Principal, Data Engineer
About The Position
The Principal Data Engineer is a senior technical leadership position responsible for driving the enterprise data strategy and shaping how data engineering is executed across the organization. This role acts as the technical authority for data engineering, defining engineering excellence, setting standards, and guiding teams in the design, delivery, and operation of modern data platforms—primarily leveraging Microsoft Fabric. You will translate business and finance transformation goals into scalable, governed data architectures while remaining hands-on for critical designs. This role is ideal for a seasoned engineering leader who owns end-to-end delivery and is passionate about building durable, well-governed, enterprise-scale data platforms that support analytics and future AI/ML workloads.
Requirements
- Demonstrated experience as a Lead or Principal Data Engineer, owning architecture and delivery of enterprise-scale data platforms.
- Deep hands-on experience with Microsoft Fabric and/or Azure data services (Fabric Lakehouse, Data Factory, Synapse, Databricks).
- Strong ability in data modeling, ETL/ELT design, and modern data warehousing concepts.
- Proficiency in programming languages such as Python or Scala.
- Proven ability to establish and enforce engineering standards and best practices.
- Advanced SQL capability and strong understanding of modern data architectures.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Nice To Haves
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
- Experience supporting finance or enterprise reporting use cases, with understanding of financial data domains.
- Familiarity with CI/CD, DevOps, DataOps, and governance tooling.
- Experience modernizing legacy data platforms into cloud-native architectures.
- Experience implementing AI/ML solutions in Azure + Fabric environments.
- Knowledge of Microsoft Purview and enterprise data governance frameworks.
Responsibilities
- Leading implementation of the enterprise data strategy and aligning it with business and finance transformation goals.
- Serving as the principal technical authority for data engineering across teams and programs.
- Defining and evolving the target-state data platform using Microsoft Fabric and Azure services.
- Establishing and enforcing data engineering best practices, coding standards, modeling patterns, and DataOps practices.
- Implementing engineering excellence controls (quality gates, observability, reliability, production readiness).
- Championing modern engineering automation and deployment practices.
- Designing, developing, and overseeing enterprise-scale pipelines, ETL/ELT processes, and data models.
- Guiding teams in building performant, governed lakehouse, warehouse, and semantic models.
- Staying hands-on for critical architectures and complex engineering challenges.
- Partnering with business and analytics teams to translate requirements into high-quality data solutions.
- Acting as a trusted advisor to senior leaders on risks, tradeoffs, and technical direction.
- Mentoring engineers to raise technical maturity across the organization.
- Ensuring solutions meet enterprise expectations for availability, reliability, performance, and cost efficiency.
- Overseeing operations, monitoring, troubleshooting, and continuous improvement of data pipelines.
- Driving modernization of legacy workflows into cloud-native, Fabric-based platforms.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
Number of Employees
101-250 employees
