Principal Data Engineer

Abbott is a global healthcare leader that helps people live more fully at all stages of life. Our portfolio of life-changing technologies spans the spectrum of healthcare with leading businesses and products in diagnostics medical devices nutritionals and branded generic medicines. Our 122000 colleagues serve people in more than 160 countries.

Position Overview

The Principal Data Engineer (IC) is a senior individual contributor and the accountable technical leader for assigned cross-domain initiatives and enterprise data engineering capabilities. The role owns integrated technical direction and technical outcomes for work spanning multiple data domains defines and stewards enterprise engineering standards and reference architectures and drives convergence where duplicated or inconsistent solutions create enterprise cost risk or operational burden. The role advises on scope sequencing capacity dependencies and technical debt but does not independently commit domain resources or business delivery dates. This position has no people-management responsibility.

Enterprise Data operates a domain-aligned model built on Databricks and Unity Catalog. Working with Domain Leaders Staff Engineers Platform Engineering and partner organizations the role converts ambiguous enterprise needs into executable architecture and carries the most complex or highest-risk work through validation and production. The role remains hands-on through prototyping reference implementations critical-path development design and code review and production problem solving.

This role is based in Madison WI.

Essential Duties

Include but are not limited to the following:

Cross-domain technical leadership and delivery

• Own the technical outcome of assigned cross-domain initiatives from initial ambiguity through production and lifecycle support.
• Convert enterprise needs into integrated architecture and executable technical plans decomposing complex work into deliverable increments across domains.
• Coordinate technical execution across domain Staff Engineers and partner teams identifying dependencies and architectural risks and escalating decisions requiring business or delivery authority.
• Remain hands-on through prototypes reference implementations critical-path development technical validation and production problem solving.

Enterprise architecture and standards

• Define steward and evolve enterprise data engineering standards patterns and reference architectures and drive convergence where inconsistent or duplicative implementations create enterprise cost risk or operational burden.
• Lead architecture for assigned enterprise capabilities including semantic and metrics layers canonical data models batch API event-driven and streaming patterns and governed data products supporting analytics machine learning and AI.
• Establish enterprise data-contract standards covering schemas service expectations compatibility breaking-change policy and producer-consumer responsibilities and partner with Platform Engineering to convert recurring cross-domain needs into shared capabilities.

Technical leadership and mentorship

• Lead enterprise design and code reviews for high-complexity or cross-domain work and coach and mentor Staff and Senior Engineers across domains without formal people authority.
• Communicate architecture and technical tradeoffs clearly to engineering business and executive stakeholders and build reusable guidance that increases engineering consistency across Enterprise Data.

Operational excellence security and efficiency

• Evaluate architecture tradeoffs across reliability scalability performance security privacy operability adoption and technical cost and drive cost-efficient use of compute storage streaming and orchestration.
• Serve as the enterprise technical escalation for incidents involving multiple domains or shared architecture patterns and lead root-cause analysis and preventive changes for recurring enterprise issues.
• Design and review architectures handling 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 and advance responsible engineering practices including approved AI-assisted development capabilities.
• Ability to work nights and/or weekends as needed.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelors Degree in Data Science Computer Science Information Systems Mathematics or Engineering.
• Expert-level experience with software development design and development and with relevant domain specific skills (see below).
• Spark on Databricks or comparable platforms; Python Scala SQL and Snowflake experience.
• ETL and ELT data pipelines including batch and event-driven patterns.
• 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.
• Open data file and table formats (Parquet Avro Delta Lake); cloud infrastructure and delivery services (AWS S3 SQS and GitLab CI/CD).
• REST API development; familiarity with BI concepts and Tableau performance considerations.
• Agile development tools; including but not limited to JIRA Confluence repository.
• Demonstrated ability to lead through influence across multiple teams and communicate complex technical decisions to senior engineering business and executive stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to perform the essential duties of the position with or without accommodation.

Preferred Qualifications

• Databricks Apache Spark Delta Lake and Unity Catalog at enterprise scale.
• Kafka change data capture and production event-streaming architectures.
• Semantic or metrics layer design canonical data models and governed data products.
• Cloud data architecture in AWS Azure or Google Cloud Platform.
• Life sciences diagnostics or clinical laboratory environments involving protected health information HIPAA CLIA FDA or Quality Management System requirements.
• Technical assessment and architecture direction for vendor and external-partner platforms.

The base pay for this position is

$129300.00 $258700.00

In specific locations the pay range may vary from the range posted.

Product Development

ONCO Cancer Diagnostics

United States > Madison : 1 Exact Lane

Standard

Yes 5 % of the Time

No

Continuous sitting for prolonged periods (more than 2 consecutive hours in an 8 hour day) Keyboard use (greater or equal to 50% of the workday)

Abbott is an Equal Opportunity Employer of Minorities/Women/Individuals with Disabilities/Protected Veterans.

EEO is the Law link - English: EEO is the Law link - Espanol: Experience:

Staff IC