Principal Data Engineer

Abbott Laboratories is hiring a Principal Data Engineer to lead cross-domain enterprise data engineering initiatives on-site in Madison, WI.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical outcome for assigned cross-domain initiatives from early ambiguity through production and lifecycle support.
• Translate enterprise needs into integrated architecture and executable technical plans, breaking complex work into deliverable increments across domains.
• Coordinate technical execution with domain Staff Engineers and partner teams, surfacing dependencies and architectural risks and escalating decisions needing business or delivery authority.
• Stay hands-on across prototypes, reference implementations, and critical-path development through technical validation and production problem solving.
• Define, steward, and evolve enterprise data engineering standards, patterns, and reference architectures; drive convergence when inconsistent or duplicative implementations add enterprise cost, risk, or operational burden.
• Lead architecture for enterprise capabilities, including semantic and metrics layers, canonical data models, and batch, API, event-driven, and streaming patterns.
• Design governed data products supporting analytics, machine learning, and AI use cases.
• Establish enterprise data-contract standards covering schemas, service expectations, compatibility, breaking-change policy, and producer-consumer responsibilities; partner with Platform Engineering to convert recurring needs into shared capabilities.
• Lead enterprise design and code reviews for high-complexity or cross-domain work; coach and mentor Staff and Senior Engineers through influence across domains without formal people-management authority.
• Communicate architectural tradeoffs clearly to engineering, business, and executive stakeholders; build reusable guidance to improve consistency across Enterprise Data.
• Evaluate tradeoffs across reliability, scalability, performance, security, privacy, operability, adoption, and technical cost; drive cost-efficient use of compute, storage, streaming, and orchestration.
• Act as enterprise technical escalation for incidents spanning multiple domains or shared architecture patterns; lead root-cause analysis and preventive changes for recurring enterprise issues.
• Design and review architectures that handle protected health information to meet applicable security, privacy, lineage, audit, Quality Management System, HIPAA, CLIA, and regulatory requirements.
• Provide technical direction and due diligence for vendor and external-partner solutions; advance responsible engineering practices including approved AI-assisted development capabilities.
• Work nights and/or weekends as needed.
• Uphold the company mission and values through accountability, innovation, integrity, quality, and teamwork.
• Support and comply with the company’s Quality Management System policies and procedures.
• Maintain regular and reliable attendance.
• Demonstrate an inclusion mindset and model these behaviors for the organization.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Information Systems, Mathematics, or Engineering; or a High School Diploma/General Education Degree with 12 years of relevant experience as outlined in the essential duties in lieu of the Bachelor’s Degree.
• Expert-level experience with software development design and development plus relevant domain-specific skills.
• Spark on Databricks (or comparable platforms) and experience with Python, Scala, SQL, and Snowflake.
• ETL and ELT data pipelines, including batch and event-driven patterns.
• Experience designing and implementing data modeling solutions using relational, dimensional, and/or NoSQL databases.
• Database architecture testing methodology, including execution of test plans, debugging, and testing scripts and tools.
• Experience with open data file and table formats: Parquet, Avro, Delta Lake; and cloud infrastructure/delivery services including AWS, S3, SQS, and GitLab CI/CD.
• REST API development; familiarity with BI concepts and Tableau performance considerations.
• Agile development tools including JIRA and Confluence repository.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through influence across multiple teams and communicate complex technical decisions to senior engineering, business, and executive stakeholders.
• Ability to perform the essential duties of the position with or without accommodation.

Technologies

• Databricks, Unity Catalog, Spark
• Python, Scala, SQL, Snowflake
• ETL, ELT, Parquet, Avro, Delta Lake
• AWS, S3, SQS, GitLab CI/CD
• REST API, Tableau
• JIRA, Confluence
• HIPAA, CLIA

Preferred Qualifications

• Enterprise-scale experience with Databricks, Apache Spark, Delta Lake, and Unity Catalog.
• Kafka, change data capture, and production event-streaming architectures.
• Experience designing semantic or metrics layers, canonical data models, and governed data products.
• Cloud data architecture experience in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.
• Life sciences, diagnostics, or clinical laboratory environments involving protected health information with experience across HIPAA, CLIA, FDA, and/or Quality Management System requirements.
• Technical assessment and architecture direction for vendor and external-partner platforms.

Compensation

• Base pay range: USD 129,300 - 258,700 per year.
• Pay range may vary by specific location.

Location: Madison, WI (onsite)