# Principal Data Engineer, People Data

**Company:** [Okta](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/okta)
**Location:** Bellevue, WA, Chicago, IL, San Francisco, CA, Washington, DC
**Role:** Data Engineering
**Salary:** $176k – $271k/yr
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** SQL, Airflow, dbt, Snowflake, Redshift, AWS, S3, AWS Lambda, emr, ecr, EKS, Spark, Kafka, Databricks, iceberg
**Posted:** 2026-07-17

> Principal Data Engineer focused on People/HR data platforms. Design and maintain scalable data pipelines, quality frameworks, and lakehouse architectures to unlock employee lifecycle insights. Requires 10+ years data engineering experience, deep HR data modeling expertise, and proficiency with AWS, Snowflake, Spark, Kafka, dbt, and Airflow.

## Job Description

## What you’ll be doing

- Design, build and evolve high scale data solutions that serve as the reference architecture for the organization and simplify data access across the organization
- Develop data quality frameworks, monitoring, anomaly detection, and alerting, with governance, lineage tracking, and change management rigor appropriate for externally reported numbers
- Drive adoption of consistent data modeling patterns, naming conventions, documentation norms, and metric governance standards across the data organization
- Lead cross-functional technical initiatives across data verticals to accelerate delivery and harden data systems
- Navigate ambiguity and make sound technical decisions, balancing short-term delivery with long-term infrastructure investment
- Champion Data Contracts: implement data contracts and schema evolution practices to ensure reliability across global product teams
- Mentor and Scale: Raise the technical bar by mentoring senior engineers, leading cross functional task forces, and fostering a culture of engineering excellence and data driven decision making
- Stay at the forefront of the data landscape, adopting and advocating for emerging technologies and practices to guide the team’s long-term technical direction

## What you’ll bring to the role

- 10+ years in a data engineering role, with proven experience in a senior or lead capacity. Experience with Federal government compliance and security requirements is highly desirable.
- Expert-level experience with SQL, ETL/ELT tools (Airflow, dbt), and MPP databases (Snowflake, Redshift). Extensive hands-on experience with AWS services (S3, Lambda, EMR, ECR, EKS).
- Expertise in HR data - specifically in candidate lifecycle, employee records, compensation, and organizational data. Experience designing data models that capture recruiting analytics, engagement signals, and workforce planning metrics.
- Familiarity with Workday data structures is a bonus
- Experience building and maintaining batch and realtime pipelines using technologies like Spark, Kafka
- Deep experience designing and working with modern lakehouse and warehouse architectures (Databricks, Snowflake) and modern file formats (Iceberg, Delta)
- Demonstrated ability to integrate AI tools to optimize/redesign workflows and drive measurable impact (e.g., efficiency gains, quality improvements)
- Track record of hands-on collaboration with Data Science, Business, and Product teams

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