Data Infra Platform Engineer

About Thales in Singapore

Thales is a globally recognized technology leader trusted by governments and enterprises to address complex challenges. Their expertise spans quantum computing, AI, cybersecurity, and next-generation networks like 6G. In Singapore, a hub since 1973, Thales employs 2,000 people across aerospace, defense, security, digital identity, and cybersecurity sectors, delivering state-of-the-art solutions to empower crucial decision-making and community safety.

Role Overview and Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain cloud infrastructure using Terraform, implementing modular and configurable code for deploying diverse cluster profiles, ensuring high standards of code quality and reusability.
• Manage infrastructure as code with practices like version control, review, testing, and GitOps workflows, detecting configuration drift actively.
• Engineer and operate the underlying infrastructure on Kubernetes supporting data platforms such as an Apache Iceberg lakehouse with Polaris catalog, query engines like Trino, Kafka streaming, Airflow orchestration, and managed databases on object storage (ADLS Gen2).
• Focus on deployment, security, scaling, and upgrading of these platform components with multi-tenancy, role-based access control, governance, and financial operations to maintain a robust shared environment.
• Administer data governance and metadata management layers to ensure discoverability, lineage tracing, classification, and access control, while enforcing data management policies including naming conventions and retention.
• Create self-service interfaces for teams to independently provision resources like Kafka topics, Iceberg tables, Airflow connections, namespaces, and query access, reducing manual dependencies, with proper documentation such as runbooks and guides.
• Oversee the data platform's operational health by defining and monitoring service level indicators and objectives (SLIs/SLOs), managing incident responses, lifecycle upgrades, and conducting root-cause analysis to minimize disruptions and data loss.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related disciplines; Master’s degree preferred if applicable.
• Demonstrable experience (typically 3-5 years) in building end-to-end, production-quality, self-service data platform capabilities.
• Strong hands-on practice with Kubernetes, particularly managing stateful and distributed systems and troubleshooting under pressure.
• Operational expertise with at least one major data platform component such as Kafka, Iceberg, Trino, Spark, or Airflow.
• Experience managing data exploration and visualization tools like Grafana, Apache Superset, Elasticsearch, and Kibana.
• Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or OpenTofu alongside GitOps tools such as FluxCD or Argo CD.
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and release management using platforms like GitLab or equivalents.
• Sound understanding of cloud-native security principals including least privilege access, network segmentation, secrets management, identity, and supply-chain security.
• Operational best practices including defining SLOs, incident management, and conducting smooth upgrades without data loss.
• Programming skills in Python plus one of Go or Bash, with confidence operating in Linux environments.
• Strong belief in infrastructure-as-code virtues: version-controlled, peer-reviewed, tested, and secured.

Preferred Skills and Knowledge

• Basic understanding of SQL and data modeling is a plus, although the role primarily focuses on infrastructure management.
• Experience with Azure services including AKS, ADLS Gen2, AI Foundry, Key Vault, Entra ID, and Private Endpoints.
• Familiarity with Kafka and Strimzi for topic, schema, and credential management.
• Experience with lakehouse architectures and query engines such as Iceberg, Polaris, Trino, and Spark on object storage systems.
• Hands-on with Airflow and its providers including connection management.
• Knowledge of metadata governance tools like DataHub, including lineage, classification, and catalog RBAC.
• Experience managing databases on Kubernetes such as CloudNativePG.
• Involvement in building or running internal developer or data platforms.

Personal Attributes

• Ability to comprehend systems end-to-end with a non-siloed outlook.
• Product mindset treating the platform as a product, relying on metrics and user adoption rather than assumptions to guide enhancements.
• Adaptability, eagerness to learn, and self-motivation.
• Comfortable working within agile teams and directly collaborating with development users.
• Resilient and open to constructive feedback while maintaining strong convictions humbly.

Culture and Values

Thales champions a workplace founded on respect, trust, collaboration, and passion where employees are encouraged to excel and contribute to technology that creates safer, greener, and more inclusive societies.