Senior Engineer - Data Engineering

About the Role:

We're seeking a Senior Data Analytical Engineer to collaborate with our Field Data business-building insightful, interactive reports that inform data-driven decisions and strengthen field performance. You'll partner with business and product teams, own end-to-end datasets, lead reporting projects, and mentor offshore and cross-functional engineers.

Technical Overview

We operate a high-volume analytics platform (ingesting ~300 GB/day; 3-4 TB persisted) built on Databricks (AWS) + Unity Catalog, Spark, Airflow and Control-M. Reporting is primarily Power BI (self-serve + embedded) and SSRS (paginated). Reports are embedded in a React wrapper running on Kubernetes. This role delivers robust, scalable data products today and evolves them with ML, streaming, and cloud-native best practices.

What You'll Do:

• Demonstrates technical leadership to team.
• Establishes, aggregates, and shares team standards and best practices within department.
• Utilizes working relationships across teams within their division.
• Assesses and provides solutions to system-wide architectural problems.
• Lead design, development, and support of end-to-end analytics: ingest → transform

semantic datasets → reporting.

• Build and optimize batch and streaming ETL pipelines (Databricks/Spark, Delta Lake) and produce performant Power BI datasets and paginated reports.
• Ensure data governance and security: enforce Unity Catalog policies, RLS, encryption, access controls, and leverage catalog/metadata tools effectively.
• Coordinate and mentor offshore and cross-team resources; gather requirements, prioritize work, and demo deliverables to stakeholders.
• Maintain platform reliability: monitoring, observability, automated testing (unit/regression/E2E), data quality checks, and incident response.
• Implement CI/CD for notebooks, SQL, models, and reports; automate deployments and APIs for data consumption.

What You'll Bring to the Role:

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years' experience building production analytics/reporting solutions, with strong Databricks, Power BI background
• Proven ability to lead projects, mentor distributed teams, and deliver end-to-end analytics solutions leveraging the technical skills listed above
• Skilled at translating business needs into high-performance, accessible technical solutions
• Databricks & Spark (production Spark development, partitioning, incremental loads) and Delta Lake
• Advanced SQL / Spark SQL and Python for ETL, orchestration, and analytics
• Power BI (data modeling, DAX, Power Query/M), Power BI Embedded, and SSRS/paginated reports
• Real-time fundamentals (Structured Streaming, Kafka/Kinesis or equivalent) and optimizing batch/stream loads
• AWS (S3, IAM) with Databricks on AWS; Unity Catalog experience
• Git + CI/CD pipelines, Terraform (or equivalent IaC), and observability tooling
• Strong data governance/security (RLS, IAM, encryption)
• Agile/JIRA experience and strong stakeholder communication
• ML & MLOps: model development/deployment, feature engineering and integrating ML/LLM outputs into reports
• Front-end & embedding: React + TypeScript, Power BI Embedded, Kubernetes, custom visuals (TypeScript/D3)
• Big data/cloud scale: Lakehouse optimization and Databricks performance tuning; exposure to
• Snowflake/Redshift/Synapse
• DevOps & governance at scale: automated testing for pipelines/reports, data lineage/catalog tools (Purview/Glue), cost-optimized cloud design

Skills You'll Have:

• Analytical Thinking: Organizes and compares various aspects of a situation to comprehend and identify key or underlying complex issues using quantitative data and analysis; leverages strong business acumen, problem solving, and interpersonal skills to think critically about situations from multiple perspectives and consistently seeks ways to improve processes.
• Cross Functional Partnering & Planning: Facilitates collaboration, communication, coordination, and planning with individuals and teams from different functions within the organization, and who have different areas of expertise, to achieve common goals.
• Data Literacy: Utilizes appropriate data for a particular purpose by thinking critically about information yielded by data analysis; applies data analytics tools/methods and their appropriate purposes and recognizes when data is being misrepresented to resolve issues or escalate to the appropriate party.
• Software Development: Creates and maintains applications, frameworks, and other software components via designing, programming, testing, and bug fixing; writes and maintains source code for all processes in the software development life cycle and facilitates the automation and orchestration of disparate systems. Leverage TDD (Test Driven Development) and BDD (Behavior Driven Development) methodologies to ensure unit, integration, and end-to-end testing with appropriate level of coverage is met.

#LI-hybrid

Compensation Range:

Pay Range- Start:

$104,090.00

Pay Range- End:

$193,310.00

Geographic Specific Pay Structure:

Structure 110:

Structure 115:

We believe in fairness and transparency. It's why we share the salary range for most of our roles. However, final salaries are based on a number of factors, including the skills and experience of the candidate; the current market; location of the candidate; and other factors uncovered in the hiring process. The standard pay structure is listed but if you're living in California, New York City or other eligible location, geographic specific pay structures, compensation and benefits could be applicable, click here to learn more.

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Northwestern Mutual is an equal opportunity employer who welcomes and encourages diversity in the workforce. We are committed to creating and maintaining an environment in which each employee can contribute creative ideas, seek challenges, assume leadership and continue to focus on meeting and exceeding business and personal objectives.