Principal Data Engineer - CX Analytics

Unum Group • Portland, ME

7h • $109,100 - $224,000 • Onsite

About The Position

We are seeking a Principal Data Engineer to join the CX Analytics team within our Customer Experience Organization. In this role, you will lead the design and implementation of data solutions that enable BI/reporting and advanced analytics across the team, ensuring data is accessible, reliable, and structured for meaningful use across our team. You will build and maintain scalable data pipelines, develop and optimize data models, and integrate new data sources across the ecosystem, including both structured and unstructured data. A core focus of the role is enabling analytics through automation and advancing how we leverage AI—developing and supporting pipelines that incorporate unstructured data and LLM-based workflows to extract signal from sources such as raw text. As a hands-on technical leader, you will define standards and best practices for data engineering while mentoring other engineers and partnering closely with BI Analysts and Data Scientists to support their work. You will help shape how data flows through the team, ensuring environments, pipelines, and datasets are built with quality, scalability, and usability in mind. The ideal candidate is a strong problem solver and collaborator who can work across technologies and data domains, guide technical direction, and consistently enable the team to deliver high-quality analytics that support better decision-making across the organization. This is a campus-based role. Current remote and field-based Unum employees may apply and will be considered in accordance with company policy.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in quantitative field is required, Master’s or PhD is preferred
• 8 years of professional experience or equivalent relevant work experience preferred
• Expertise in at least one relevant object-oriented programming language (i.e. Java/Scala, Python).
• Experience in DevOps best practice including CI/CD, process automation and optimization.
• Good understanding of data architecture principles and related infrastructure requirements, covering on-prem and Cloud platforms.
• The ability to understand and present data in the appropriate context, including a good understanding how the data will build towards a business solution.
• Expertise in writing complex SQL queries that join multiple tables/databases.
• Independently explore databases/tables or other legacy data content to identify best data sources to solve business problems.
• Demonstrates ability to troubleshoot complex SQL queries with little guidance.
• Demonstrates ability to create logical data models by combining data from multiple sources including internal and external data
• Demonstrated communication skills
• Demonstrated ability to understand and explain a problem and identify and communicate an appropriate solution.
• Leader within their field, both internally and externally.
• Naturally effective coach and mentor, actively engages peers and team members, especially within areas of expertise.
• Viewed as a leader in change management.
• Maintains depth of technical understanding of third party/cloud solutions.
• Actively participates in determining staffing needs of the team, including hiring and development.
• Leads assigned team in the completion of requested activities and projects.
• Coaches, mentors, and helps build team.
• Proactively identifies and researches new approaches and skills needed for performing data science and advanced analytics.

Nice To Haves

• Experience in financial services
• Leadership experience working with senior management and executive leadership
• Attention to detail while effectively and independently prioritizing work and managing multiple projects simultaneously.
• Entrepreneurial self-starter.
• A thorough, results-oriented problem-solver, and a lifelong learner with voracious curiosity.
• Deep expertise in their organization.
• Demonstrates ability to conduct independent research and development of techniques that may be shared internally and externally.

Responsibilities

• Proactively partner with the business to provide development, construction, testing, and maintenance of data pipelines that support the needs of the business.
• Integrate large volume of highly complex data from different sources (including DB2, SQL Server, Web API and Teradata).
• Apply validation, aggregation, and reconciliation techniques to create a rich data framework.
• Work closely with the data scientists and business partners to understand the business problem they are trying to solve and the analytics solutions they plan to apply. Use this understanding to create appropriate data structures tailored for the specific problem.
• Build and maintain best practices for team's data engineering strategy; as well as staying informed of best practices across industries and striving for innovation and efficiency.
• Understand and contribute to the evolution of the enterprise data architecture including the application of current and emerging data frameworks and tools (eg hosting data in Cloud).
• Efficiently prepares results for interpretation and/or visualization and communicates findings and potential value to influence strategic decision making.
• Support integration of solutions within existing business processes using automation techniques.
• Continuously research and build upon deep understand theory and application of current and emerging software and data engineering practices.
• Provides support, training and/or mentorship to lower level Data Engineer peers.
• Perform other related duties as assigned

Benefits

• Competitive benefits package that includes: Health, Vision, Dental, Short & Long-Term Disability
• Generous PTO (including paid time to volunteer!)
• Up to 9.5% 401(k) employer contribution
• Mental health support
• Career advancement opportunities
• Student loan repayment options
• Tuition reimbursement
• Flexible work environments
• healthcare benefits (health, vision, dental)
• insurance benefits (short & long-term disability)
• performance-based incentive plans
• paid time off
• 401(k) retirement plan with an employer match up to 5% and an additional 4.5% contribution whether you contribute to the plan or not.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal