Principal, Data Engineer

American Tower

3d

About The Position

The Team We are seeking a Principal Data Engineer to join American Tower’s Information Technology organization’s Data & Analytics team. The team architects, builds, and optimizes cloud-native data foundations that enable analytics, artificial intelligence (“AI”), and enterprise-scale data products. Day to day you will design and evolve the enterprise data platform, lead complex solution design, and embed governance enforcement through technical controls. As a Principal Data Engineer, you will set engineering standards, mentor engineers, and collaborate extensively with decentralized analytics teams across the Global Operations, Finance, and Sales departments to accelerate value delivery.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree required, with a concentration in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Mathematics, or a related quantitative field preferred.
• A minimum of 8 years of data engineering or data platform development experience with at least 5 years as a senior or principal-level technical leader required.
• Expert-level proficiency in Structured Query Language, Python programming language, and large-scale processing with Apache Spark or PySpark.
• Deep experience with major cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, and with modern data platforms such as Databricks or Snowflake.
• Strong understanding of streaming technologies such as Apache Kafka or Amazon Kinesis, orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow, and transformation frameworks such as Data Build Tool.
• Mastery of data modeling, semantic modeling, and performance tuning across data warehouse, lakehouse, and streaming architectures.
• Ability to implement technical governance (data quality, lineage, metadata, access management, and privacy controls) and establish engineering standards (CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and automated testing).
• Ability to lead complex technical design, influence without authority, and mentor engineers to raise the technical bar.
• Strong written and oral communication skills, including the ability to present ideas and suggestions clearly and effectively.
• Ability to work with different functional groups and levels of employees to effectively and professionally achieve results.
• Strong organizational skills; ability to accomplish multiple tasks within the agreed-upon timeframes through effective prioritization of duties and functions in a fast-paced environment.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree in a related field preferred.

Responsibilities

• Architect and evolve the enterprise data platform including ingestion, transformation, storage, orchestration, and serving layers for batch and streaming use cases.
• Design and implement end-to-end data pipelines, reusable frameworks, and enterprise data models (dimensional, data vault, domain-oriented) to power analytics, AI, and operational use cases.
• Define and operationalize the semantic data layer and embed governance enforcement through technical controls (data quality, validation, lineage, metadata, access).
• Establish engineering standards for coding, testing, version control, documentation, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (“CI/CD”); optimize cost, performance, and scalability using FinOps principles.
• Lead design reviews, root cause analyses, and incident responses; partner with the Data Science team to productionize models and enable real-time/batch inference.
• Collaborate with Data Products, IT, security, and architecture teams to deliver secure, resilient, and compliant data products with strong service level agreements.
• Evaluate emerging technologies, guide build-versus-buy decisions, and mentor engineers through code reviews, technical talks, and best practices.
• Engage decentralized analytics teams to share standards and reusable components while avoiding duplication of efforts.
• Other duties as assigned.

What This Job Offers

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