Principal Data Engineer

At Morningstar, we rely on powerfully insightful data to make decisions. We’re seeking an experienced Principal Data Engineer to put it to good use. The ideal candidate will have the expected organizing data by applying metadata concepts, combined with a problem-solving skill to achieve business goals. This person will wear many hats in the role, but much of the focus will be on building data structures to support effective services, event driven ETL/ELT processes and data driven system design to support pub/sub driven solution design. In this role, you'll shape the long-term vision for how data is collected, stored, integrated, and used across the organization. You’ll collaborate with data engineers, analysts, business leaders, and IT to ensure scalable, secure, and high-performing data systems that align with business goals.

To foster continuous collaboration, we follow a hybrid policy in which you will work onsite a minimum of 3 days per week in our Chicago office.

Objectives of this role

• Work with data structure to solve business problems, designing, building, and maintaining the infrastructure to answer questions and improve processes.
• Help streamline our data management and processing workflows, adding value to our service offerings, and building out data lifecycle models.
• Work closely primarily with Sales, Marketing and Finance teams to develop data models and pipelines to support technical service and business requirements.
• Be an advocate for best practices and continued learning.

Responsibilities

• Work closely with our Sales, Marketing, Finance and Enterprise Data Platform teams to help build scalable data structure and data driven ETL/ELT solution design that support pub/sub and event driven concepts.
• Evaluate and recommend modern data technologies, platforms, tools, and practices (Cloud data warehouses, data lakes, streaming platforms) to develop strategy for long term data platform architecture.
• Provide guidance and mentorship to junior architects, engineers, and analysts to build a strong data-driven culture.
• Ensure data systems are optimized for scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency.
• Model front-end and back-end data dependencies to help draw a comprehensive picture of data flows throughout the system and to enable effecti.ve data management and service definition.
• Design and implement metadata-driven data models that align with the organization's data governance framework and enable scalable, consistent, and efficient business intelligence solutions.
• Develops and maintains scalable data pipelines that support seamless service integrations and ever-increasing data volume and complexity.
• Collaborates with cross functional teams in the organization to improve data models that feed business intelligence tools, increasing data accessibility, and fostering data-driven decision making across the organization.
• Implements processes and systems to monitor data quality, ensuring production data is always accurate and available for key stakeholders, services and business processes that depend on it.
• Performs data analysis required to troubleshoot data related issues and assist in the resolution of data issues.
• Integrate AI and machine learning capabilities into data architecture to enhance data quality, automate data management processes, and enable advanced analytics and predictive insights.

Required Skills

• Bachelor’s or Masters degree (or equivalent) in computer science, information technology, engineering, or related discipline
• 10+ year experience with Python, SQL, No-SQL, and data management tools
• 10+ year experience in Object-oriented programming languages using mainstream programming languages (e.g., C#/.NET, Python, Java etc.)
• 6+ year experience in Amazon AWS ecosystem and modern data warehouse tooling, including data loading tools (Airbyte, FiveTran, Informatica), data transformation tools (DBT), and metadata management tools (Atlan, Acryl DataHub)
• Excellent communication skills, especially for explaining technical concepts to nontechnical business leaders.
• Ability to work on a dynamic, and fast-paced team that has concurrent projects.
• Data pipelines and workflow management tools (e.g., AWS Glue, Airflow, Apache NiFi, etc.)
• Excellent problem-solving and organizational skills.
• Proven ability to work independently and with a team.

Preferred Skills and Qualifications

• Experience in building or maintaining data structures, ETL and ELT processes at scale.
• Knowledge in AWS RDS, Redshift, ElastiCache, Glue, Kinesis, and Step Function are highly desired.
• Relevant professional certification is nice to have.