Principal Data Platform Engineer
Arlington, VA (3 days a week – hybrid) – Locals who can go F2F
6-12+ Months
Onsite interview required
Rate: $80/hr on C2C
Any Visa
15+ years experienced candidates needed
Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
• Support the architecture and implementation of the Snowflake data platform — including environment design, Bronze / Silver / Gold medallion layering, enterprise data model recommendations, and standards that promote consistency as the platform grows.
• Provide senior technical guidance on platform changes, helping ensure new pipelines and sources align with established patterns and avoid unnecessary one-off solutions.
• Assist with the infrastructure-as-code foundation, including AWS provisioning via CloudFormation and Snowflake configuration, RBAC, and schema objects deployed through CI/CD, so the environment is version-controlled and repeatable.
• Design, build, and document ELT pipelines that ingest, transform, and curate data from structured and unstructured source systems into the medallion architecture, and provide technical review of contributions from the delivery partner and internal team as requested.
• Implement data quality controls — validation, reconciliation against sources, and quality monitoring — and drive remediation with source-system owners when issues originate upstream.
• Support the implementation of the platform’s governance posture by translating NRECA’s data governance standards into recommended platform controls, including role-based access, recertification processes, data classification with masking and row-level protections, retention and deletion practices, and audit-ready lineage and access evidence.
• Provide technical recommendations and implementation support to help the platform meet NRECA’s security and compliance requirements, including PrivateLink connectivity and relevant data-protection obligations.
• Serve as a contracted technical counterpart to the third-party delivery team during the build, participating actively in design and implementation activities while supporting real-time knowledge transfer to NRECA personnel.
• Provide knowledge transfer, documentation, and technical coaching to help NRECA’s internal data engineering team operate, maintain, and extend the platform after the engagement.
• Enable data consumers — supporting BI and analytics teams, publishing governed data products (curated datasets, data marts, and consumption schemas) for self-service and citizen development, and maintaining the documentation that makes the platform usable without gatekeeping.
• Set and enforce standards for the semantic layer — ensuring business definitions are modeled once, consistently, and pushed into governed data structures rather than duplicated across individual reports.
• Advise IT leadership and business stakeholders on translating enterprise data and analytics priorities into implementation sequencing, future source onboarding considerations, and potential AI/ML workload readiness.
• Partner with NRECA’s AI Center of Excellence to make governed data available to AI workloads — curating AI-ready data assets, establishing patterns for retrieval and search, and evaluating emerging Snowflake capabilities such as Cortex AI, semantic models, and vector-based structures — with the CoE owning AI solution delivery.
Formal Education Required:
Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field.
Experience and Certifications Required:
Minimum of 10 years of progressive experience in data engineering, data warehousing, or related technical roles, including at least five (5) years of hands-on experience architecting and building on Snowflake.
Demonstrated experience implementing a medallion (Bronze / Silver / Gold) or comparable layered architecture, operating in an infrastructure-as-code model, and deploying through Git-based CI/CD workflows.
Experience serving as a technical lead or senior point of accountability on a data platform or program, including setting standards and reviewing the work of others.
Experience implementing platform observability, monitoring, alerting, and operational dashboards.
Snowflake certification (e.g., SnowPro Core or Advanced) and/or relevant AWS certifications preferred.
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities Required (as demonstrated by prior work experience):
• Deep Snowflake expertise, including warehouse design, RBAC, performance tuning, and cost management.
• Full understanding of the Snowflake Data and AI Cloud — Cortex / Snowpark ML, Snowflake Openflow, Snowpipe, Snowpark, SnowSQL, Snowflake Horizon, and Snowflake data warehousing.
• Strong proficiency in Python and advanced SQL, with the ability to design pipelines that are testable, observable, and maintainable.
• Experience with cloud architectures, including AWS in a data context (e.g., S3, IAM, networking/PrivateLink).
• Familiarity with the end-to-end data analytics workflow, from source ingestion through transformation, semantic modeling, and BI consumption (e.g., Power BI).
• Strong data modeling and data warehousing fundamentals, with knowledge of databases and modern ELT patterns.
• Working command of data governance and security practices — access control design, data classification, PII handling, retention, and lineage.
• Problem-solving skills applicable to large-scale (“big data”) environments, with the ability to diagnose and resolve complex data and platform issues.
• Ability to communicate technical decisions and trade-offs, both verbally and in writing, to technical and non-technical audiences in a clear and precise manner.
• Ability to work effectively alongside an external delivery partner and to facilitate knowledge transfer and technology evaluation.
• Ability to provide service excellence by building relationships, being resourceful, responsive and respectful.
Thanks
Robert Finley
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