Principal Data Engineer - HR Data & Scale

Okta; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 197,000 - 270,600; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401(k)

Flexible spending account

Paid leave

Job summary

Okta seeks a Principal Data Engineer to lead the Data and Insights team, architecting and scaling data solutions for HR-related data across recruiting and employment. You will collaborate with product, analytics, and data science to ensure data availability and integrity at enterprise scale.

You will drive data quality, governance, and contracts, mentor senior engineers, and shape the long-term technical direction while leveraging Spark, Kafka, and lakehouse architectures.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in data engineering, senior/lead, with strong governance and security exposure.
• Expert SQL, ETL/ELT tooling (Airflow, dbt) and MPP databases (Snowflake, Redshift).
• Extensive AWS experience (S3, Lambda, EMR, ECR, EKS).
• HR/data domain experience: candidate lifecycle, employee data, org data.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve high-scale data solutions and reference architectures.
• Develop data quality, monitoring, governance and lineage for external reporting.
• Standardize data modeling, naming, documentation, and metric governance.
• Lead cross-functional data initiatives to accelerate delivery.
• Make sound technical decisions balancing short-term needs and long-term infra.
• Implement Data Contracts and schema evolution for reliability.
• Mentor engineers and foster data-driven decision making.
• Stay ahead with new data tech to guide long-term direction.

Skills

SQL

Airflow

dbt

Snowflake

Redshift

AWS

Data modeling

Spark

Kafka

Databricks

Iceberg/Delta

Tools

Python

Job description

Okta seeks a Principal Data Engineer to lead the Data and Insights team, architecting and scaling data solutions for HR-related data across recruiting and employment. You will collaborate with product, analytics, and data science to ensure data availability and integrity at enterprise scale.

You will drive data quality, governance, and contracts, mentor senior engineers, and shape the long-term technical direction while leveraging Spark, Kafka, and lakehouse architectures.