Principal Data Engineer

About the role

We are building a new Audience Network platform to power McDonald’s emerging Commerce Media strategy, enabling the creation, activation, and measurement of customer audiences across internal and external ecosystems. The Principal Data Engineer will serve as the senior technical authority for this platform, defining the architecture, standards, and long-term evolution of systems that support audience cohort creation, feature engineering, and activation.

Responsibilities

• Define and align on the target-state architecture for the Audience Network platform
• Establish core pipelines for audience computation, enrichment, and activation
• Enable integration with key activation platforms
• Implement foundational privacy, consent, and data governance controls
• Drive adoption of engineering standards across teams

Audience, Data & ML Platform Enablement

• Architect scalable workflows for audience segmentation and feature engineering
• Define reusable patterns for cohort creation and activation
• Enable near real-time and batch processing for activation SLAs
• Establish standards for data contracts, lineage, and observability

Privacy, Security & Governance

• Embed privacy-by-design principles across platform components
• Enable consent-aware audience modeling and activation
• Define data traceability and auditability standards
• Support privacy-safe data collaboration

Cross-Functional Influence & Technical Leadership

• Translate business goals into platform capabilities
• Influence technical decisions and investments
• Mentor engineers and raise engineering standards

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience building large-scale data systems
• Expertise in cloud-native platforms (GCP preferred)
• Experience with batch and event-driven data systems
• Workflow orchestration experience (Airflow)
• Experience supporting ML workflows
• Strong understanding of data governance and privacy

Compensation

The expected salary range for this role is $195,371 - $244,214 per year

Benefits

• Health and welfare benefits, including but not limited to comprehensive health insurance, which includes medical, prescription drug, mental health, dental and vision coverage, as well as, life insurance.
• Bonus eligible: Yes
• Long term Incentive eligible: Yes