Data Platform Lead - IT Transformation

POSITION DESCRIPTION

Position Title: Data Platform Lead - IT Transformation

Reports To: MANAGER – IT TRANSFORMATION

Direct Reports: No Functional Unit: Information Technology

FLSA Status: Exempt Position Type: Full-Time

Office Location: Denver

THE COMPANY

Onward Energy is an independent power platform that owns and operates over 7 GW of utility-scale wind, solar and natural gas generation projects across the U.S. Our Vision is to reliably power a sustainable future. Our Mission is that as North America’s premier independent power generator, we will deliver renewable and reliable power to our customers, opportunities to our employees, sustainable returns to the families who invest in us, and a better world to the next generation. Corporate Offices in Denver, New York and Charlotte, we are where renewable meets reliable. See www.onwardenergy.com for more information.

THE CHALLENGE

The Data Platform Lead on the IT Transformation Team plays a foundational role in building the data platform that will power Onward Energy’s next phase of growth. The Data Platform Lead will partner with the Transformation Manager and business stakeholders to design, implement, and support a cloud-hosted data repository at Onward. The Data Platform Lead’s efforts will directly impact how Onward Energy can reduce manual effort around data, surfaces operational performance in real time, and unlocks future AI and automation use cases across the fleet.

THE ROLE

Reporting to the IT Transformation Manager, you will help design, build, and operate the ingestion, transformation, and serving pipelines that make up Onward’s enterprise data platform. The target architecture is a cloud-hosted data lakehouse[LD1] (within DataBricks, etc.) with Power BI as the delivery layer, integrating core systems such as AVEVA PI, Ignition, Maximo, and Workday alongside ISO/market, weather, and other external data sources. You will partner directly with Operations, Performance Engineering, Asset Management, SCADA, Power Markets, and FP&A to translate spreadsheet-based logic and tribal knowledge into governed, reproducible data products. This hands-on position demands strong technical depth, a business-first mindset, comfort with ambiguity, and a genuine interest in shaping how an organization uses its data.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Partner with Solar / Wind / Thermal Operations, Performance Engineering, Asset Management, and other teams to discover and prioritize the first data use cases – contributing to stakeholder interviews, mapping current Excel-based workflows, and defining what to build first on the platform.
• Design, build, and maintain ingestion and transformation pipelines in Databricks to bring operational data from AVEVA PI, Ignition, Maximo, Workday, and ISO/market sources into a governed Lakehouse — covering wind, thermal, and solar assets.
• Serve as the technical counterpart to external consulting partners engaged in the platform build, translating business requirements into pipeline specifications, validating deliverables, and ensuring work aligns with Onward's long-term architecture.
• Own long-term pipeline reliability end-to-end: define data availability and quality standards, build monitoring and alerting, and resolve ingestion or transformation failures before they impact downstream reporting.
• Contribute to data governance practices - including ownership models, role-based access for sensitive operational and financial data, and quality standards.

THE PROFILE TO SUCCEED

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field.
• 4+ years of hands-on data engi