Principal Data Engineer

Walmart • Bentonville, AR

10d • Onsite

About The Position

The Principal Data Engineer translates and co-owns business problems within their discipline, identifies appropriate methods and tools, and develops data-related or mathematical solutions. The role provides expert advice, guidance, and best practices while helping align action plans with customer and business needs.

The position works with business stakeholders to address complex issues, develop business cases with projected return on investment or cost savings, translate business requirements into projects and tasks, and connect business needs to practical solutions. It identifies suitable data sources, performs initial data-quality checks, and supports requirements and service-level agreement prioritization.

The role generates data visualizations and model representations for business audiences, works with user-experience designers and user-interface engineers as needed, and mentors junior associates. It also profiles and monitors data quality, validates requirements, manages data-quality procedures and issues, supports data cleansing and access controls, and educates others on data governance and relevant policies.

The Principal Data Engineer collects and evaluates data, applies appropriate statistical techniques, supports exploratory data analysis research, and recommends statistical models based on hypotheses. The role requires experience building data pipelines, working with cloud platforms and large-scale data stores, developing dashboards and analyses, and collaborating with cross-functional teams.

Requirements

• Master’s degree or equivalent in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field plus 3 years of software engineering or related experience; or 7 years of software engineering or related experience; or a bachelor’s degree or equivalent in one of those fields plus 5 years of software engineering or related experience.
• Experience coding in Python, SQL, PySpark, HTML, and Scala.
• Experience designing, building, and maintaining ETL pipelines using Hadoop, Apache Spark, Hive, and BigQuery on cloud platforms such as GCP, AWS, or Azure.
• Experience with data warehousing technologies including Amazon Redshift, Teradata, S3, and BigQuery.
• Experience using SQL, Spark SQL, and NoSQL for data manipulation and retrieval.
• Experience with script automation, identifying bottlenecks, automated pipelines, and query optimization.
• Experience with retail and digital advertising KPIs such as CTR and impressions, and interpreting HTML and cookies from the backend.
• Experience using JIRA, GitHub, and project-management tools for sprint planning, backlog management, and progress tracking with dashboards.
• Experience developing dashboards with Power BI, Tableau, and Medallia; designing surveys, defining KPIs, and improving email response rates.
• Experience with hypothesis testing, A/B testing, and machine-learning models such as forecasting and regression using Python libraries including Scikit-learn, Pandas, Matplotlib, and Seaborn.
• Experience parsing, cleansing, and querying unstructured data in formats such as Parquet, JSON, TXT, and CSV.
• Experience managing Amazon EC2 instances for scalable cloud computing resources.
• Experience collaborating with cross-functional teams, contributing to a technical community, and mentoring junior engineers.

Responsibilities

• Translate and co-own business problems into data-related or mathematical solutions; identify appropriate methods and tools and explain how they address business problems.
• Provide expert advice and guidance, apply information and best practices, and support action plans aligned with customer and business needs.
• Recommend solutions for complex business issues and develop business cases with projected return on investment or cost savings.
• Translate business requirements into projects, activities, and tasks aligned with business strategy; connect business needs to tangible solutions and identify relevant business insights.
• Support prioritization of requirements and service-level agreements, identify fit-for-purpose data sources, and perform initial data-quality checks.
• Generate appropriate graphical representations of data and model outcomes; design data representations for multiple data sets and work with user-experience designers and user-interface engineers as needed.
• Present insights to teams and business stakeholders, adapt communication to the audience, and mentor junior associates on data storytelling.
• Promote data-quality awareness; profile, analyze, assess, test, validate, measure, and monitor data quality; and deliver against data-quality service-level agreements.
• Manage data-quality procedures and issues, lead data-cleansing activities, and improve data quality by removing defects and unused data.
• Determine user accessibility and remove or restrict user access as needed; interpret company and regulatory policies and educate others on data governance processes and guidelines.
• Collect and tabulate data and evaluate results for accuracy, validity, and applicability.
• Support the identification and application of statistical techniques, apply techniques under leadership direction, and assist with exploratory data analysis research planning and implementation.
• Understand existing statistical models and identify and recommend models based on hypotheses.
• Build and maintain ETL pipelines and data solutions; automate scripts, identify bottlenecks, and optimize queries.
• Develop dashboards, design surveys, define KPIs, and improve email response rates.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, contribute to the technical community, and mentor junior engineers.

Benefits

• Medical, vision, and dental coverage.
• 401(k), stock purchase, and company-paid life insurance.
• Paid time off, including sick leave, parental leave, family care leave, bereavement leave, jury duty, and voting leave.
• Short-term and long-term disability.
• Education assistance, including company-paid college degrees.
• Company discounts, military service pay, and adoption expense reimbursement.
• Annual or quarterly performance incentives.

What This Job Offers

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