Our client is a US-headquartered, market-leading enterprise in their sector with a multi-decade history and an agile, global network. We are seeking a highly skilled Principal Data Engineer to join their expanding Budapest team as a senior technical individual contributor. In this role, you will define data platform architecture and directly shape future-proof, data-driven, and AI-enabled solutions.
Pozíció leírása / Job description- Architecture & Implementation: Architect and implement production-grade data solutions on AWS and Databricks — from lakehouse design through pipeline delivery, ensuring high performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.
- Technical Strategy & Standards: Translate the overall data strategy into concrete technical blueprints, reference architectures, and actionable implementation plans. Establish and enforce architectural standards, data modeling conventions, and engineering best practices.
- Data Platform Foundations: Own the design and buildout of core data platform components — including ingestion frameworks, transformation layers, data quality enforcement, and serving patterns.
- ML/AI Enablement: Design data pipelines and lakehouse structures that directly enable Machine Learning and AI workloads, collaborating closely with Data Science and MLOps teams.
- Platform FinOps: Drive FinOps at the architecture level — right-sizing compute/storage, building cost attribution models, and implementing cost optimization patterns across the platform.
- Technical Mentorship: Mentor data engineers through architectural guidance, pair programming, and code reviews without carrying people-management responsibilities.
- Core Experience: 8+ years as a hands-on data engineer or data architect with recent, demonstrated production delivery in modern cloud-native stacks.
- Senior / Principal Track: 3+ years operating at a Staff, Principal, or Senior Architect level as an individual contributor driving technical direction.
- Databricks & AWS Expertise: Deep production experience with the Databricks Lakehouse on AWS — Unity Catalog, Delta Live Tables, Databricks SQL, Databricks Workflows, and Structured Streaming. Strong working knowledge of supporting AWS services (S3, IAM, Glue, Lambda, Kinesis, Redshift).
- Data Modeling & Observability: Expert-level data modeling skills (Dimensional, Data Vault, Lakehouse paradigms) and proven experience building data quality frameworks and automated testing into pipeline architectures.
- Infrastructure-as-Code: Proficiency with Terraform, CloudFormation, or Databricks Asset Bundles.
- FinOps Approach: Hands-on experience designing architectures that control compute spend and optimize resource utilization.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Production experience building data infrastructure that directly enabled ML/AI product features (e.g., feature engineering pipelines, training datasets, model monitoring).
- Experience with real-time or near-real-time data architectures (streaming ingestion, CDC, event-driven patterns).
- Familiarity with Data Mesh principles, domain-oriented platform design, and enterprise data governance (access controls, PII handling, lineage).
- High Technical Impact: A unique professional challenge to shape the core data platform for a stable, market-leading global enterprise.
- Competitive Compensation: Senior/Principal level base salary and annual target bonus.
- Benefits Package: Cafeteria allowance and private health insurance package.
- Flexibility: Hybrid working model requiring 3 days of office presence (Budapest) and offering 2 days of Home Office per week.
Ildikó Mező-Mészáros - ildiko.mezo-meszaros@randstad.hu
Lili Wenner - lili.wenner@randstad.hu
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