Lead Cloud Data Engineer - GCP, Data Pipelines & AI

Panera Bread Company; Saint-Louis; Hybrid; EUR 114,000 - 147,000; Full time

Job summary

Panera Bread Company is seeking a hands-on Lead Cloud Data Engineer to design, build, and operate enterprise data platforms on Google Cloud. You will oversee ingestion, transformation, streaming, governance, and cost management while mentoring a team of data engineers.

The role partners with architects, product owners, and operations to deliver scalable, secure data products that enable strategic business outcomes and leverage AI capabilities to improve productivity and data quality.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, MIS, or related field (Master’s preferred).
• 5+ years of experience in data engineering, data platform development, and cloud‑based data solutions, including demonstrated technical leadership and mentoring responsibilities.
• 4+ years designing and delivering large‑scale data platforms on GCP or similar.
• 4+ years with BigQuery, SQL routines, partitioning and optimization.
• 4+ years with Dataflow/Dataproc, Python, PySpark, SQL, Pandas for large‑scale processing.
• Experience with cloud cost optimization and IaC, CI/CD pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Design and deploy large-scale enterprise data pipelines on Google Cloud data platform.
• Lead and mentor a team of data engineers, promoting excellence and collaboration.
• Develop scalable batch, real-time, and streaming pipelines aligned with architecture standards.
• Translate enterprise data architecture into production‑ready solutions supporting operational and analytical workloads.
• Enforce engineering best practices, code reviews, CI/CD, and deployment governance.
• Define and promote reusable architectural patterns and data governance standards.
• Own production operations including monitoring, incident response, RCA, and continual improvement.

Skills

Data engineering

Leadership

Cloud platforms

Mentoring

GCP

SQL

Python

Data governance

ETL/ELT

CI/CD

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS/Engineering

Master’s degree preferred

Tools

Cloud Composer

Airflow

Terraform

GitLab

Looker

Power BI

Kafka

Job description

Panera Bread Company is seeking a hands-on Lead Cloud Data Engineer to design, build, and operate enterprise data platforms on Google Cloud. You will oversee ingestion, transformation, streaming, governance, and cost management while mentoring a team of data engineers.

The role partners with architects, product owners, and operations to deliver scalable, secure data products that enable strategic business outcomes and leverage AI capabilities to improve productivity and data quality.