Principal Data Engineer (15+ yrs)

**Responsibilities:** * Design enterprise data models and platform standards that scale across business domains. * Define reference architectures, design patterns, and reusable frameworks for the enterprise data ecosystem. * Partner with architecture, analytics, and business leaders to align data strategy with organizational priorities. * Define and operationalize standards for data ownership, stewardship, lineage, metadata, data quality, and governance tooling. * Ensure data handling complies with healthcare regulatory requirements, including Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and protected health information (PHI) safeguards. * Lead database migrations, consolidation efforts, and data modernization programs, including migration roadmaps, sequencing, and cutover strategies. * Refactor legacy pipelines and data structures into governed, reusable enterprise assets. * Design and optimize secure, scalable, and cost-effective Snowflake solutions, including warehouse sizing, workload management, role-based access, data sharing, and cost governance. * Design ingestion patterns for application programming interfaces (APIs), software as a service (SaaS) platforms, change data capture (CDC), batch, and event-driven sources. * Establish standards for reliability, observability, schema management, and error handling. * Establish continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), deployment standards, repository governance, and DataOps engineering practices. * Mentor data engineers, set code review standards, and serve as a technical authority and trusted advisor to stakeholders and leadership. * Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical audiences, including executives, while sharing ownership, knowledge, and credit across the team. **Qualifications:** * Exceptional communication skills and a proven team-player mindset. * 10 or more years of experience in data engineering, data architecture, or related roles, including recent senior- or principal-level technical leadership. * Deep, hands-on Snowflake expertise in production, enterprise-scale environments. * Proven experience designing enterprise data models, such as dimensional models or Data Vault. * Demonstrated success leading large-scale legacy database migrations and modernization programs. * Strong experience with data governance, metadata management, lineage, and data quality frameworks. * Experience designing ingestion architectures across batch, CDC, API, SaaS, and streaming or event-driven sources. * Strong SQL and Python skills. * Experience establishing CI/CD pipelines, Git-based repository governance, and DataOps practices. * Ability to influence and advise technical and executive audiences. **Preferred Qualifications** * Healthcare or other regulated-industry experience, including HIPAA and PHI or personally identifiable information (PII) handling. * Experience with dbt, Apache Airflow, Fivetran, Apache Kafka, Terraform, Collibra, or Alation. * Cloud platform experience with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Google Cloud Platform (GCP). * Snowflake certification, such as SnowPro Advanced: Architect or SnowPro Advanced: Data Engineer. * Experience supporting artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data product initiatives. * Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, a related field, or equivalent practical experience **Tools and Technologies:** * Snowflake; SQL; Python; Git; CI/CD; DataOps; APIs; SaaS integration; CDC; batch and event-driven architecture; data governance; metadata management; data lineage; data quality frameworks. * Preferred technologies may include dbt, Apache Airflow, Fivetran, Apache Kafka, Terraform, Collibra, Alation, Microsoft Azure, AWS, or GCP. Pay: $85.00 - $90.00 per hour Application Question(s): * How many years you have experience with Snowflake? * Do you have experience with 10 or more years of experience in data engineering, data architecture? Work Location: Remote