Principal Data Engineer

Humana Inc. is a leading U.S. healthcare company that focuses on providing quality health services. They are seeking a Principal Data Engineer to design and deliver data pipelines for the NBA platform, ensuring data quality and leading a small team of engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Pipeline delivery - design, build, and own the Bronze/Silver/Gold lakehouse pipelines that power the NBA platform: member profiles, clinical signals, behavioral data, web clickstream, and socioeconomic features
• Hands-on development - actively write and ship production SQL, Python, and Spark code alongside your team; this is not a supervisory role
• Data modeling - own the Gold layer schema that serves as the canonical member feature set for model training and batch scoring; make design decisions that balance flexibility, performance, and governance
• Data quality - build and maintain data quality checks, null/sparsity monitoring, and pipeline alerting so the team knows before anyone else when something is wrong
• External data integration - onboard new data sources (clinical feeds, government datasets, third-party signals) from raw ingestion through production-ready features
• Contractor management - manage data engineering contractors within your pod; set expectations, review work, and hold the team to quality standards
• Cross-functional partnership - work closely with the Principal Decision Intelligence Engineer on feature requirements, and with software engineering pods on how data flows into the decisioning system

Requirements:

• Sponsorship is not available for this role
• Bachelor's degree in computer science or relevant field
• 10+ years of data engineering experience with at least 1-2 years in a tech lead or senior lead capacity
• Deep hands-on experience with Databricks and Delta Lake - you have built and owned production pipelines, not just contributed to them
• Strong SQL and Python skills; comfortable with Spark at scale
• Experience designing and owning a medallion lakehouse architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold or equivalent)
• Proven ability to lead a small team or pod through delivery and manage contractor resources
• Strong data quality instincts - you treat bad data as a production incident
• Clear communicator - you can explain a pipeline design decision to a data scientist, a product owner, and a compliance officer
• Comfort using AI productivity tools (Claude, Copilot, or similar) to accelerate development and analysis
• Masters degree
• Experience with Databricks Delta Live Tables, Unity Catalog, and Feature Store
• Familiarity with Kafka-based event pipelines and real-time data ingestion
• Background in healthcare, insurance, or other regulated industries with PHI/HIPAA data handling requirements
• Experience integrating government or third-party datasets (CMS, CDC, STARS, or similar)