Principal Engineer -Data Engineering

Job description

**About this role:** Wells Fargo is seeking a highly motivated Principal Engineer to design, architect, and lead Data Engineering initiatives within the HR Information Technology organization. This role requires a hands‑on technologist who can anchor critical initiatives to drive operational excellence and enhance employee and customer experience. The Principal Engineer will provide technical leadership across the design, development, and operationalization of Data and Generative AI solutions, while shaping the enterprise HR data strategy. This role will oversee the architecture and delivery of scalable, secure, and resilient data engineering solutions across the HR data ecosystem, enabling advanced analytics, AI‑driven insights, and next‑generation HR capabilities. The Principal Engineer will also act as a trusted advisor to senior leadership, influencing architecture decisions, solution design, and implementation strategies to ensure alignment with business objectives, enterprise standards, and long‑term technology strategy. **In this role, you will:** - Act as an advisor to leadership to develop or influence applications, network, information security, database, operating systems, or web technologies for highly complex business and technical needs across multiple groups - Lead the strategy and resolution of highly complex and unique challenges requiring in-depth evaluation across multiple areas or the enterprise, delivering solutions that are long-term, large-scale and require vision, creativity, innovation, advanced analytical and inductive thinking - Translate advanced technology experience, an in-depth knowledge of the organizations tactical and strategic business objectives, the enterprise technological environment, the organization structure, and strategic technological opportunities and requirements into technical engineering solutions - Provide vision, direction and expertise to leadership on implementing innovative and significant business solutions - Maintain knowledge of industry best practices and new technologies and recommends innovations that enhance operations or provide a competitive advantage to the organization - Strategically engage with all levels of professionals and managers across the enterprise and serve as an expert advisor to leadership **Required Qualifications:** - 7+ years of Engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated through one or a combination of the following: work experience, training, military experience, education **Desired Qualifications:** - 7+ years of progressive engineering experience with sustained hands‑on expertise in architecture, system design, and end‑to‑end solution development. - 7+ years of Data Engineering experience, with strong expertise in driving migration from legacy data platforms to cloud‑native, lakehouse‑based architectures - 3+ Years of Hands-on experience in transformation of legacy data framework to modern stack in private or public cloud. - Architect and implement modern data platforms using Azure Fabric (OneLake, Data Factory, Synapse, Real‑Time Analytics, Power BI integration). - Design and build data pipelines and platforms on GCP using services such as : BigQuery, Dataflow/Apache Beam, Pub/Sub, Dataproc/Spark, Cloud Storage, Cloud Composer/Airflow, Dataplex, Data Catalog - Deep expertise in SQL, Python, and distributed data processing frameworks (Spark, Beam) - Strong hands‑on background of developing large scale enterprise applications. - Experience with data modeling, ETL/ELT patterns, and Lakehouse architecture. - Hands on experience in building modernized applications using Microservice architecture. - Cloud-native engineering experience — serverless, managed Spark, event-driven architectures. - Familiarity with containerization (Docker, K8s) and workflow operators. - Knowledge of data governance platforms (Collibra, Alation, Purview). - Experience implementing lineage, observability, drift detection. - Drive innovation by introducing emerging AI technologies, frameworks, and best practices to improve decision‑making, automation, and predictive insights. - Strong background in AI, Machine Learning, GenAI, including retrieval systems, embeddings, chunking strategies, and agentic AI workflows. **Job Expectations:** - Enterprise Technical Stewardship - Act as a Principal Engineer and strategic advisor to senior leadership, shaping technology decisions that impact multiple lines of business and the broader enterprise. - Define and evolve enterprise‑scale architectures for Data modernization ensuring alignment with security, risk, and regulatory requirements. - Hands‑On Leadership - Remain deeply hands‑on—designing, reviewing, and occasionally coding critical components to set a high engineering bar. - Lead by example in applying engineering rigor, automation, testing, performance optimization, and secure coding practices. - Influence & Thought Leadership - Serve as a visible technical spokesperson internally and externally, presenting ideas, architectures, and innovation narratives with clarity and conviction. - Mentor senior engineers and architects, raising the overall technical maturity of the organization. - Foster a culture of engineering excellence, curiosity, and continuous learning. - Outside‑In Innovation - Continuously scan the external ecosystem to bring new ideas, technologies, and patterns into the enterprise in a pragmatic, value‑driven manner. - Challenge legacy thinking and advocate for simplification, modernization, and platform thinking. - Balance innovation with operational stability, risk management, and long‑term sustainability. - Data Engineering - Responsible for designing, developing, optimizing, and maintaining metadata‑driven, scalable, high‑performance data engineering frameworks that power critical data ecosystem in the HR space. - Define and execute the enterprise data engineering roadmap aligned to business priorities. - Mentor data engineeri