Principal, Data Engineering
Alcon
Summary
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.
Job description
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.
Requirements
- 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
Benefits
- Health insurance
- Life insurance
- Retirement plan
- Flexible time off
Company overview
Alcon Inc. is the global leader in eye care, dedicated to helping people see brilliantly. Founded in 1945 as a small pharmacy in Fort Worth, Texas, the company has grown into the world's largest eye care device company with complementary businesses in Surgical and Vision Care. As a Swiss-American multinational corporation headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland with major operations in Fort Worth, Texas, Alcon operates in 60 countries and serves patients in over 140 countries. The company's Surgical segment focuses on ophthalmic products for cataract surgery, vitreoretinal surgery, refractive laser surgery, and glaucoma surgery, including implantables, consumables, and surgical equipment. The Vision Care segment comprises daily disposable, reusable, and color-enhancing contact lenses, along with a comprehensive portfolio of ocular health products for dry eye, contact lens care, and ocular allergies. With over 75 years of heritage, Alcon has a long history of industry firsts and makes substantial annual investments in research and development to meet evolving customer needs and advance patient care. The company became an independent publicly-traded entity in 2019 after spinning off from Novartis.