The Principal Data Engineer is a senior technical leader responsible for designing, building, and evolving scalable, reliable, and secure enterprise data platforms and data products.
This role provides hands-on technical leadership across data architecture, data pipelines, cloud platforms, data quality, governance, and engineering practices. The Principal Data Engineer partners closely with Data Science, BI/Analytics, product teams, business stakeholders, and technology teams to ensure trusted, well-engineered data is available for analytics, AI, machine learning, reporting, and operational use cases.
The role is intended to be a technical leadership position rather than a people-management position, with significant responsibility for architecture decisions, engineering standards, mentoring, and solving the organization's most complex data engineering challenges.
In this role, a typical day will include:Technical Leadership & Architecture- Serve as a technical leader for enterprise data engineering solutions.
- Design scalable data architectures, data pipelines, integration patterns, and reusable data services.
- Establish engineering standards for data ingestion, transformation, storage, orchestration, testing, monitoring, and deployment.
- Lead technical design reviews and guide teams toward scalable solutions rather than short-term fixes.
- Evaluate emerging data technologies and recommend practical adoption where they provide measurable value.
Data Pipeline Engineering- Design and develop robust batch and streaming data pipelines across enterprise data sources.
- Build reusable frameworks that improve development speed, consistency, observability, and maintainability.
- Optimize data pipelines for performance, scalability, reliability, and cost.
- Establish monitoring and alerting to proactively identify pipeline and data-quality issues.
- Improve pipeline reliability, freshness, and data-quality outcomes, which are specifically identified as engineering measures in your current organization material.
AI & Analytics Enablement- Partner with Data Scientists and analytics teams to create reliable, AI-ready data foundations.
- Develop data pipelines and curated datasets supporting machine learning, forecasting, optimization, Generative AI, and advanced analytics.
- Support production AI solutions through appropriate data architecture, lineage, quality controls, monitoring, and reusable data services.
- Work closely with ML/AI engineering teams to enable scalable model development and deployment.
What you will bring to Alcon:- Bachelor's Degree or Equivalent years of directly related experience (or high school +13 yrs; Assoc.+9 yrs; M.S.+2 yrs; PhD+0 yrs)
- The ability to fluently read, write, understand, and communicate in English
- 5 Years of Relevant Experience
Preferred Qualifications:- Power BI
- Business intelligence
How You Can Thrive at Alcon:- Lead alongside high-performing teams in a culture that values collaboration, accountability, and continuous improvement.
- Grow your career through leadership development and meaningful enterprise impact.
- Join Alcon's mission to provide outstanding, innovative products and solutions to improve sight, improve lives, and grow your career!
- Alcon provides robust benefits package including health, life, retirement, flexible time off, and much more!
See your impact at:
alcon.com/careersATTENTION: Current Alcon Employee/Contingent WorkerIf you are currently an active employee/contingent worker at Alcon, please click the appropriate link below to apply on the Internal Career site.
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