Starburst Platform Engineer

Indent

PSL309947-4

Role

Starburst Platform Engineer

Location

Charlotte, NC (Hybrid)

Rate: $58 to $60/hr

Starburst Platform Engineer (GCP Data Virtualization & SQL Acceleration)

Position Summary

We are seeking an experienced Starburst Platform Engineer to support and expand Wells Fargo's enterprise Data Virtualization platform powered by Starburst on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The successful candidate will be responsible for the end-to-end deployment, administration, optimization, and support of the Starburst platform, enabling business users and engineering teams to access and analyze data across multiple on-premises and cloud data sources through a unified SQL layer.

This role requires deep expertise in Starburst Enterprise Platform (SEP), Trino, GCP services, Kubernetes/GKE, data access governance, and customer engagement. The engineer will act as a trusted advisor to data consumers, helping optimize SQL workloads, troubleshoot platform issues, and drive adoption of enterprise data virtualization capabilities.

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Key Responsibilities

Platform Engineering & Deployment

• Design, deploy, configure, and maintain Starburst Enterprise Platform (SEP) in Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Manage Starburst clusters running on GKE, including coordinators, workers, autoscaling, upgrades, patching, and infrastructure optimization.
• Configure and support integrations with BigQuery, Cloud SQL, GCS, Iceberg catalogs, Teradata, Oracle, SQL databases, and other enterprise data sources.
• Implement platform security, IAM integration, RBAC, authentication, authorization, and governance controls.
• Support production, non-production, disaster recovery, and business continuity environments.
• SQL Performance Optimization & Query Acceleration
• Analyze and optimize user SQL workloads for performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Recommend best practices for federated queries, joins, partition pruning, caching, materialized views, and semantic layer usage.
• Troubleshoot long-running queries, memory issues, concurrency bottlenecks, and workload management challenges.
• Assist users in tuning analytical workloads and achieving optimal performance across distributed data sources.
• Provide guidance on Starburst SQL features, query execution behavior, and platform capabilities.

User Support & Customer Engagement

• Serve as the primary technical contact for Starburst platform consumers.
• Investigate and resolve production incidents, access issues, authentication failures, catalog connectivity problems, and data access concerns.
• Collaborate closely with business stakeholders, analysts, data scientists, data engineers, and application teams.
• Conduct onboarding sessions, knowledge transfer workshops, and platform enablement activities.
• Guide customers through query development, troubleshooting, and platform adoption.
• Manage support tickets and coordinate escalations with vendors, infrastructure teams, and engineering partners.

Platform Operations & Governance

• Monitor platform health, cluster utilization, catalog performance, and operational metrics.
• Perform capacity planning and workload optimization.
• Automate catalog onboarding, configuration management, and operational processes.
• Ensure compliance with enterprise security, audit, masking, retention, and governance standards.
• Participate in release planning, change management, and production support activities.

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Required Qualifications

Technical Skills

• 7+ years of experience supporting large-scale data platforms and analytics solutions.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience with Starburst, Trino, Presto, or distributed SQL engines.
• Strong experience deploying and managing workloads in Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Expertise in

o Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

o BigQuery

o Cloud SQL

o Google Cloud Storage (GCS)

o IAM and Security Controls

o CI/CD and Infrastructure Automation

• Strong SQL development and performance tuning skills.
• Experience with Iceberg catalogs, data lake architectures, and federated query platforms.
• Knowledge of distributed query engines, workload management, and cloud-native architectures.

Customer-Facing Skills

• Ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Strong troubleshooting and problem-solving capabilities.
• Experience supporting enterprise customers and managing production incidents.
• Ability to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
• Proven ability to mentor users on SQL development and performance optimization.

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Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Data Virtualization platforms and Data Mesh architectures.
• Familiarity with Dremio, Dataproc, BigQuery federation, and modern lakehouse technologies.
• Knowledge of Apache Iceberg, Hive Metastore, REST Catalogs, and metadata management.
• Experience supporting enterprise analytics tools such as Tableau, MicroStrategy, ThoughtSpot, or Power BI.
• Financial services industry experience preferred