Principal Data Engineer (Remote)

Title: Principal Data Engineer

Employment Type: Contract (12 months), W-2

Compensation: $90-$100/hour

Location: Alhambra, CA - California residents only

Work Model: Remote

Industry: Government / Public Sector

Work Authorization: Applicants must be authorized to work in the United States for any employer. Sponsorship is not available for this position.

Company Overview

A public-sector organization delivering essential infrastructure and community services. This opportunity supports the data environment used to organize information and enable reliable analysis.

Position Description

The Principal Data Engineer designs, implements and manages analytical data infrastructure. The role brings technical ownership across data integration, quality, operations, platform architecture and governance to build a dependable, scalable environment. It combines hands-on engineering with collaboration and technical mentoring.

Additional Skills Required

• Clear verbal and written communication and a customer service orientation.
• Strong analytical and business judgment.
• Organization and time management skills, including the ability to manage multiple concurrent tasks.
• Effective collaboration and independent project execution.
• Attention to detail and consistent delivery of high-quality work.
• Ability to mentor junior data engineers and database administrators.

Additional Experience Required

• Five or more years of professional experience specializing in Databricks, with substantial expertise in data engineering, data integration, data warehousing and cloud computing.
• Five years developing data pipelines using Python.
• Three or more years designing and developing Databricks medallion Lakehouse architecture and applying data governance and data quality best practices.
• One year developing data models.
• One year managing Azure resources.
• One year automating Azure data resources using DataOps.

Additional Education Required

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering or a related field. Additional qualifying experience may substitute for the required education on a year-for-year basis.

Additional Information

• Candidates must currently reside in California.
• The schedule is 40 hours per week across four 10-hour days, Monday-Thursday, within 7:15 a.m.-6:00 p.m. The program manager determines the work schedule.
• Background checks and Live Scan fingerprinting are required.
• No travel is required.