Principal Data Engineer
About The Position
McDonald’s is building a new Audience Network platform to power its emerging Commerce Media strategy. This platform will enable the creation, activation, and measurement of customer audiences across internal and external ecosystems. The Principal Data Engineer will be the senior technical authority for this platform, responsible for defining its architecture, standards, and long-term evolution. The role focuses on building scalable, privacy-safe systems that produce trusted audience data and activation signals for use by Data Science, Analytics, AdTech, and external partners.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience building large-scale data systems
- Expertise in cloud-native platforms (GCP preferred)
- Experience with batch and event-driven data systems
- Workflow orchestration experience (Airflow)
- Experience supporting ML workflows
- Strong understanding of data governance and privacy
Nice To Haves
- Experience with audience or marketing platforms
- Familiarity with identity resolution and activation systems
- Experience with DSPs or CDPs
- Experience with data clean rooms
Responsibilities
- Define and own the end-to-end architecture for the Audience Network platform.
- Establish architecture standards, reference designs, and guardrails.
- Design for identity resolution and interoperability across platforms.
- Serve as the technical authority for complex design decisions.
- Architect scalable workflows for audience segmentation and feature engineering.
- Define reusable patterns for cohort creation and activation.
- Enable near real-time and batch processing for activation SLAs.
- Establish standards for data contracts, lineage, and observability.
- Embed privacy-by-design principles across platform components.
- Enable consent-aware audience modeling and activation.
- Define data traceability and auditability standards.
- Support privacy-safe data collaboration.
- Translate business goals into platform capabilities.
- Influence technical decisions and investments.
- Mentor engineers and raise engineering standards.
Benefits
- Sabbatical program
- Tuition assistance
- Flexible work arrangements
- Health and welfare benefits
- Comprehensive health insurance
- Medical coverage
- Prescription drug coverage
- Mental health coverage
- Dental coverage
- Vision coverage
- Life insurance
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
Education Level
No Education Listed
