“In God we trust. All others must bring data.” W. Edwards Deming. Fine, Edwards. But who’s going to build the pipeline?
Your dashboards are lying to you. Not maliciously. They just haven’t had a proper Data Engineer in a while.
Somewhere in your company there is a Snowflake bill nobody can explain, a dbt project with 400 models and one person who understands it, and a “temporary” Python script from 2023 that the whole finance team now depends on. You don’t need a data scientist. You need the person who makes everything the data scientist does possible. And that person is very, very hard to find in Sydney right now.
This isn’t a job advert. It’s the opposite. Big Wave Digital has capacity, as of this week, to run a Data Engineer search for a Sydney business, and we’re putting our hand up before the slot gets taken.
Yes, we have capacity. Here’s the honest version
Big Wave Digital is two people. Keiran Hathorn and Jules Semmens. We keep it that way on purpose, which means we take fewer roles and finish all of them. A slot has just opened on the data side of the desk, and rather than quietly wait for the phone to ring, we’re telling you.
If you take it, you get the two of us on your role personally. If someone else takes it first, we’ll let you know and you’ll have to wait. We’d rather it was you.
Two flat whites. Twenty minutes. That’s all the first conversation takes, and it’s on us.
What we know about Data Engineers in Sydney
Keiran has been recruiting technologists in Sydney since 1998, back when “data engineer” meant the DBA who also knew Perl. He has recruited through the data warehouse era, the Hadoop phase everyone would like to forget, the Spark years and the current world of Snowflake, Databricks, dbt, Airflow, Kafka and whatever gets announced next quarter. Big Wave Digital has been placing data people as a specialist agency since 2010.
Things we’ll tell you on the first call, before any paperwork:
- What a mid, senior and staff Data Engineer is really being paid in Sydney this quarter, by stack. A Snowflake and dbt person and a Spark and Scala person are not the same price.
- Whether you need a Data Engineer, an Analytics Engineer or a Platform Engineer who speaks data, because hiring the wrong one is the most common mistake we see.
- Which Sydney companies have just had a data team restructure, which means strong engineers are suddenly reading messages again.
- Why your advert is pulling in BI developers and ETL contractors instead of the zero to one platform builder you actually want, and how to reword it.
The two humans on your search
Keiran Hathorn founded Big Wave Digital in 2010 and has close to 30 years in tech recruitment. Technical support before that, and before that a croupier in the high rollers room at Sydney’s casino, where he learned to spot a bluff from across a table. Useful when a candidate says they “led the migration.” He takes your brief himself, interviews every candidate himself, and tells you early if your budget and your wish list are about to have an argument.
Jules Semmens runs the parallel search. While Keiran is interviewing, Jules is mapping the market, re-approaching the people who haven’t replied and keeping the process honest and moving. Two people, no handoffs, nothing left in a queue.
Standing on a rock looking for the right candidate, as is tradition.
Awards, because you asked
Nobody hires a recruiter because of a plaque. But since you’re choosing who to trust with a search:
- SEEK SARA Award, Best Small Recruitment Agency (Technology), Winner
- SEEK SARA Award, Best Small Recruitment Agency (Technology), Runner Up, twice
- AIMIA Awards, Best Business Website, Finalist
- Recruitment International, Best Recruitment Company to Work For, Finalist
- JobAdvisor Top 10 Coolest SME Companies to Work For
- 2026 Randwick City Business Excellence Awards, Finalist
The number that matters more is 89 percent, which is our repeat client rate. In this industry that’s the only review worth reading.
Why us
Because the large agencies will “run your role” by posting it on SEEK with their logo on top and forwarding whatever lands. Because a Data Engineer search needs someone who knows what a good one looks like, not someone pattern matching keywords. Because every candidate we send has been interviewed by Keiran or Jules, told the truth about the role, and asked the hard questions about comp, notice, visa and other processes before you spend an hour with them.
We’ve built data and engineering teams for Apple, Universal Music, Leonardo.ai, Spacetalk, Crypto.com and FetchTV, plus a long list of Sydney scale ups whose first data hire had to be right. We still answer our own phones.
How it works
- Email or call Keiran. Twenty minutes on the stack, the mess, the team and the money.
- We tell you honestly whether we can fill it, roughly how long it’ll take and what it costs. No surprises later.
- Within days you get a short list. Three to five people who can genuinely do the job and genuinely want to.
- We manage interviews, feedback, the offer and the counter offer. You get a Data Engineer. Your dashboards start telling the truth.
Take the slot
Hiring a Data Engineer in Sydney, or about to? Email keiran@bigwavedigital.com.au, call +61 2 9380 4431, or connect with us here.
Tell us the stack and the problem. We’ll tell you who we’d call first.
Big Wave Digital. Sydney’s specialist technology, AI and digital marketing recruiters since 2010. Data engineering search slot open now.
