Principal Data Engineer

We are seeking a Principal Data Engineer to join our Data Platform team and lead the delivery of innovative platform capabilities and fit-for-purpose solutions to drive our business to $1B+ ARR. The ideal candidate will be a respected technology leader with a proven track record of designing, building and scaling enterprise-level data management and analytics platforms and solutions.

Reporting to the SVP, Engineering, you will be responsible for driving our platform’s multi-year data strategy, architecture and development.  You will leverage knowledge of Workiva’s information, application, and infrastructure environment as well as the current technology landscape and our business strategy to design a holistic and optimized data platform. This includes AI-based products, insights and tools for external customers as well as business intelligence for internal business stakeholders. You will collaborate across all areas of the business to deliver market-leading solutions powered by data.

What You’ll Do

 

Strategy

• Develop a deep understanding of Workiva’s customer and market needs 

• Partner with critical stakeholders to develop Workiva’s multi-year data platform strategy and roadmap

• Define functional requirements and create logical & functional architectures including data ingestion, data transformation & structuring, data storage, business logic application, Workiva platform integration, and data visualization, intelligence & insights capabilities

• Champion the best-fit technology stack to meet current and anticipated future business and platform needs

Execution

• Design, architect, develop, deliver and scale data systems and platforms

• Incorporate nonfunctional requirements of this data infrastructure including data quality, governance, lifecycle management, and compliance

• Stand-up large-scale data management and processing systems

• Design and develop data extraction and integration code modules for batch and incremental data flow from various data sources using new and existing patterns following industry best practices and an understanding of how it will fit in the greater Workiva ecosystem

• Use new and existing tools and processes to deploy to integration and production environments

• Work with Infrastructure Engineers and Release Management to develop and maintain the deploy processes

• Define what the health of the data ecosystem should be; ensure complete monitoring of the system, defining alerts on critical failure points and improving data quality by working with data owners and business partners

• Test software, validate data and write automated tests (unit, integration, functional, etc) and validate team members tests 

• Work with internal/external customers to validate completeness and ensure correctness going forward

• Lead the team in discovering emerging use cases, non standard access patterns and encryption requirements to lead industry standards in data security

• Design systems to balance data volume, latency, and customer requirements

What You'll Need

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Math, Finance, Statistics or related discipline, or equivalent combination of education and experience

• 10+ years of relevant experience in the data engineering role, including data warehousing and business intelligence tools, techniques and technology, or experience in analytics, business analysis or comparable consumer analytics solutions

Preferred Qualifications

• 2-3 years of previous statistics experience 

• Demonstrated expertise in big data processing and using databases in a business environment with large-scale, complex datasets. (Snowflake, Databricks, SQL, Hadoop, Spark, Flink, Beam, etc)

• Extensive experience using business intelligence reporting tools (QuickSight, Tableau, Splunk etc.) and Machine Learning tools and methodologies at enterprise scale 

• Extensive knowledge of SQL query design and tuning for performance and accuracy

• Extensive experience with Python, R, or other data relevant scripting languages

• Expert in working with Data Lakes/Lakehouses and exposing data for multiple different access needs

• Extensive team experience in Agile, SRE and DevOps processes and practices

How You’ll Be Rewarded

✅ Salary range in the US: $167,000.00 - $284,000.00

✅ A discretionary bonus typically paid annually

✅ Restricted Stock Units granted at time of hire

✅ 401(k) match and comprehensive employee benefits package

The salary range represents the low and