Principal Data Engineer

Location: 4x a week in San Diego, 1 day remote (Carmel Valley, 92130) Duration: 6 month contract, then opportunity to convert Please note, no current or future sponsorship will be provided. Requirements: • 6+ years of experience as Data Engineer, with recent experience at the Senior or Principal level • Expert‑level experience architecting and building scalable data solutions using Databricks or Snowflake, including Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, and Lakehouse best practices. • Strong experience designing and operating production ETL/ELT data pipelines, including orchestration, incremental processing, monitoring, and reliability. • Experience with CI/CD pipeline deployment and devops best practices • Advanced proficiency in Python and SQL, with deep experience in Spark‑based data processing, performance tuning, and production analytics workloads. • Hands‑on experience working in cloud data environments (Azure and/or AWS) supporting enterprise‑scale data platforms. • Proven technical leadership experience, including leading architecture decisions, mentoring engineers, and partnering with analytics, platform, and research teams. Nice to have: • Knowledge or experience in the Biopharma/Life Science industry. • Hands‑on experience with LIMS, ELN, or scientific/discovery data sources. • Strong understanding of data governance, security, privacy, and compliance practices in regulated environments. • Experience working with Snowflake or other cloud data warehouses alongside Databricks.