IT Principal Data Engineering

Save A Lot is looking for a Principal Data Engineer to lead the design, development, and operation of data platforms and pipelines that support their data science capabilities. This role focuses on both data engineering and data science, requiring a blend of technical expertise and consultative communication skills to collaborate with various teams and ensure data flows reliably for analysis and business consumption.

Responsibilities:

• Define the long-term technical direction for the data science platform and integration with existing ELT pipelines
• Ensure platforms are scalable, reliable, secure, and cost-efficient at enterprise scale
• Evaluate and adopt emerging tools in the modern data and ML stack
• Design, develop, and optimize ETL pipelines and outbound data feeds
• Develop and follow templates and engineering patterns to reduce the time-to-deploy new data assets or changes to an existing data model or analytics solutions
• Partner with key business teams to understand their data needs and assist them in building appropriate data solutions to meet their business needs
• Design, build, and optimize end-to-end data science pipelines — from raw data ingestion through feature engineering, model training, and inference serving
• Contribute to MLOps practices including model versioning and monitoring, supporting the transition of data science work into production
• Provide technical guidance to data engineers
• Conduct code reviews and champion engineering best practices across workstreams
• Lead without direct authority, influencing cross-functional teams across data engineering, analytics and product owners
• Establish best practices for data quality, lineage, privacy, and security across data engineering and science pipelines
• Ensure model inputs and outputs are auditable, reproducible, and compliant with data governance standards
• Partner with data engineering, product owners, and software engineers to align platform capabilities with organizational AI/ML goals
• Translate complex technical concepts into clear, actionable insights for non-technical stakeholders

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or a related field, OR 7+ years of equivalent verifiable experience, skillset, and record of accomplishment
• Experience in a Principal or Senior Data Engineer role with direct involvement in ML platform or Data Science work
• Proficiency in an analytics/BI tool such as Power BI
• Modern data stack technologies — Databricks (strongly preferred), Snowflake, Spark
• Inbound/outbound transportation of data with APIs and FTPs
• MPP databases such as Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, Teradata, or Azure Synapse
• Cloud platforms — AWS, Azure, or GCP
• Python and SQL
• Building and deploying ML models (classification, regression, forecasting, NLP, or similar)
• Familiarity with ML frameworks such as scikit-learn, XGBoost, PyTorch, or TensorFlow
• MLflow or similar tools for experiment tracking, model registry, and deployment
• Understanding of feature engineering, model evaluation, and common ML failure modes
• Strong understanding of data modelling techniques (Kimball, Data Vault) and distributed systems
• Familiarity with feature stores, training pipelines, and batch/real-time inference architectures