Principal Data Engineer

Principal Data Engineer

Client: Ally Via Cognizant
Location: Detroit, MI – Hybrid
Work Schedule: 3 days/week onsite at ADC
Max Bill Rate: $55 w2
Experience: 10+ years
Type: Potential Contract-to-Hire

Job Summary

Ally is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to design, build, and evolve modern enterprise data platforms supporting analytics, reporting, data science, and AI initiatives.

The ideal candidate will have strong hands-on experience with Snowflake, AWS, dbt, data integration, Data Vault modeling, Python, APIs, and enterprise data pipelines, along with the ability to provide technical leadership across complex data engineering initiatives.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and optimize scalable data pipelines and enterprise data solutions.
• Develop cloud-based data lakes, data warehouses, and enterprise data platforms.
• Design and implement Data Vault data models and scalable data structures.
• Build data ingestion, transformation, cleansing, standardization, deduplication, and data-quality processes.
• Work with structured and unstructured data across relational and NoSQL platforms.
• Develop API-based data services and large-scale data integration solutions.
• Establish data quality, validation, monitoring, metadata, lineage, governance, and security practices.
• Partner with business and technology teams on requirements, transformation rules, integrations, and solution architecture.
• Apply Agile and modern software engineering practices.
• Provide technical leadership, mentor engineers, and establish engineering standards.
• Support data foundations for analytics, ML, and AI/LLM use cases.

Required Skills

• 10+ years of Data Engineering experience
• Strong Snowflake experience
• Hands-on AWS – S3, AWS CLI, Lambda, DynamoDB
• dbt
• Data integration tools: Qlik Replicate, InfoSphere DataStage, CP4D
• Strong Data Vault / Data Modeling
• Enterprise data pipelines and large-scale data integration
• Python / scripting
• Git, DevOps, CI/CD, and modern software engineering practices
• API development and data migration
• Data governance, metadata, lineage, data quality, and security
• Strong relational and NoSQL database experience
• End-to-end solution architecture and technical leadership

Preferred / Plus

• Insurance business data domain experience
• AI/ML, Data Science, and LLM use cases
• Advanced degree
• Experience mentoring engineering teams and influencing senior stakeholders

Important Requirements

• Must be local to Metro Detroit
• Must be able to work hybrid – 3 days/week onsite

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