Lead IT Data Engineer

Tyson Foods is seeking a Lead IT Data Engineer to support the Beef & Pork Analytics team. This onsite role in Springdale, AR focuses on hands-on technical leadership across the design, development, governance, and operational support of enterprise data solutions built for Fresh Meats reporting.

Role Summary

The Lead IT Data Engineer will guide the delivery of governed cloud data pipelines and reusable analytics-ready datasets. Key outcomes include improving data quality and observability, ensuring secure access controls, and providing production-ready data layers for reporting within the Fresh Meats ecosystem.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead design and implementation of data engineering solutions for Beef & Pork Analytics, including Fresh Meats data lake, hub, analytics, semantic, and reporting-ready data layers.
• Translate business requirements, report needs, KPIs, functional specifications, and validation criteria into scalable data models, pipelines, transformations, and analytics-ready datasets.
• Develop, enhance, and support data products that enable Fresh Meats reporting use cases.
• Build and orchestrate complex ETL/ELT pipelines using approved enterprise patterns, with automation, dependency management, monitoring, alerting, and production support practices.
• Support integrations for DB2, SAP, USDA, and other internal or external sources into Data@Tyson/GCP, including replication, freshness monitoring, reconciliation, and exception handling.
• Create data solutions designed for reuse across analytics projects using shared dimensions, conformed business definitions, enterprise business terms, and scalable modeling practices.
• Implement and validate data security requirements, including role-based access, row-level security, column-level security, ARS roles, and data classification dependencies, as well as DSS/security review requirements when applicable.
• Collaborate with Data Governance, Data Stewards, Product Owners, Data Modeling Coaches, business SMEs, and reporting teams to ensure data assets are documented, classified, stewarded, and aligned to approved business terminology.
• Support Collibra workflows by ensuring tables, fields, lineage, classifications, and business terms are identified, reviewed, and maintained through the delivery process.
• Lead data quality, reconciliation, and observability practices so issues are detected early and traceable from source systems through GCP layers and reporting outputs.
• Participate in and lead architecture reviews, data model reviews, GitLab merge request readiness, release planning, production promotion, and change approval activities.
• Provide operational support for Beef & Pork Analytics products, including incident triage, service requests, data lake freshness issues, access/security questions, pipeline failures, and production reporting impacts.
• Coordinate with business and IT stakeholders during issue resolution by communicating impact, status, root cause, remediation steps, and validation results clearly and on time.
• Mentor data engineers and analysts in SQL, GCP, dbt, orchestration, data modeling, testing, documentation, support practices, and enterprise governance expectations.
• Manage technical relationships with internal platform teams, vendors, and third-party partners when tools, integrations, or platform capabilities are required.
• Perform other assigned job-related duties aligned with the organization’s vision, mission, values, and scope of practice.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, Analytics, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and relevant experience.
• 5+ years of relevant and practical experience in data engineering, cloud data platforms, enterprise analytics, data warehousing, business intelligence, or related technology delivery.
• Strong SQL experience building analytical datasets for enterprise reporting, dashboards, semantic models, and downstream analytics consumption.
• Hands-on experience with cloud data platforms, preferably GCP and BigQuery, or comparable cloud technologies.
• Experience designing and supporting multi-layer data architectures such as lake, hub, curated, analytics, semantic, dimensional, star-schema, or medallion-style models.
• ETL/ELT development experience including orchestration, monitoring, job dependencies, failure handling, and production support.
• Experience working with source-system data, preferably including ERP, mainframe, DB2, SAP, manufacturing, sales, finance, pricing, or commodity-related datasets.
• Understanding of data governance, metadata, business terminology, lineage, stewardship workflows, data classification, and controlled promotion into production.
• Experience implementing or supporting data security controls, including role-based, row-level, and column-level access patterns.
• Experience with Git-based development, merge requests, code review, deployment discipline, testing evidence, and change approval documentation.
• Experience with Kimball data warehouse methodology in a medallion raw-cleansed-curated data architecture.
• Ability to lead technical design discussions, identify risks, challenge assumptions, and recommend scalable and supportable solutions.

Technology Stack

• SQL, GCP, BigQuery, ETL, ELT, DB2, SAP, USDA
• Data@Tyson, Power BI, Cloud Storage, Dataproc, Pub/Sub
• Composer/Airflow, Dataflow, dbt, Python, PySpark, Spark, Terraform
• CI/CD, AtScale, Fivetran, HVR, CDC, Collibra, GitLab

Preferred Qualifications

• Preferred certification(s): Google Cloud certifications in data engineering, analytics, data governance, Power BI, or other relevant IT certification.
• Preferred technical skills include additional experience across GCP services (BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Dataproc, Pub/Sub, Composer/Airflow, Dataflow or related), dbt/Python/PySpark/Spark/Terraform and CI/CD, Power BI and semantic layer design, and ingestion monitoring and replication (Fivetran, HVR, CDC, freshness checks).

Soft Skills and Leadership Competencies

• Technical Leadership: Leads complex engineering work and coaches others toward durable, governed solutions.
• Business Partnership: Builds relationships with business SMEs, product managers, analysts, data stewards, and platform teams.
• Execution Ownership: Drives work from discovery and design through development, validation, production deployment, support, and continuous improvement.
• Communication: Communicates complex concepts, technical tradeoffs, risks, timelines, dependencies, and decisions to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Detail Orientation: Emphasizes accuracy, traceability, and documentation for business-critical and audit-sensitive work.
• Strategic Thinking: Aligns engineering choices to business outcomes, governance, security, performance, and long-term maintainability.
• Mentorship: Reinforces SQL quality, modeling standards, documentation, testing, support readiness, and problem-solving discipline.
• Change Management: Supports adoption of new data patterns, cloud practices, governance expectations, and proactive production support behaviors.

Benefits

• Paid time off
• 401(k) plans
• Affordable health, life, dental, vision, and prescription drug benefits

Work Details and Eligibility

• Location: Springdale, AR (onsite)
• Work shift: 1ST SHIFT (United States of America)
• Relocation assistance eligible: No
• Hourly applicants only: You must complete the task after submitting your application to provide additional information to be considered for employment.

Recruiting and Vendor Policy

• Tyson Foods and its subsidiaries do not accept unsolicited support from external recruitment vendors for open positions within the United States.
• Any resumes or candidate profiles submitted by recruitment vendors or headhunters to Tyson Foods or its subsidiaries without a valid written request and search agreement approved by HR will be considered the property of Tyson Foods.
• No fees will be paid if the candidate is hired due to an unsolicited referral.