Principal Data Engineer - People Data Platform Leader

Okta; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 176,000 - 242,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Bonus

Health insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

401(k)

Job summary

Okta is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to join the Data and Insights team in Illinois. You will architect, build, and maintain scalable data solutions and lead cross‑functional initiatives with product, analytics, and data science teams.

The role emphasizes data contracts, governance, and enabling trustworthy data for employee lifecycle analytics from recruiting through employment. Collaboration with HR data stakeholders and leadership is essential.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in a data engineering role, in a senior or lead capacity.
• Experience with Federal government compliance and security requirements is highly desirable.
• Expert‑level SQL, ETL/ELT tools (Airflow, dbt) and MPP databases (Snowflake, Redshift).
• Extensive hands‑on experience with AWS services (S3, Lambda, EMR, ECR, EKS).
• HR data expertise: candidate lifecycle, employee records, compensation, and organizational data.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and evolve high scale data solutions serving as reference architecture across the org.
• Develop data quality frameworks, monitoring, anomaly detection, and alerting with governance and lineage tracking.
• Drive data modeling standards, naming conventions, documentation, and metric governance.
• Lead cross‑functional technical initiatives across data verticals to accelerate delivery.
• Mentor senior engineers and lead cross‑functional task forces for engineering excellence.

Skills

SQL

Airflow

dbt

Snowflake

Redshift

AWS

S3

Lambda

EMR

ECR

EKS

HR data

Workday data

Spark

Kafka

Databricks

Snowflake/Databricks lakehouse

Tools

Spark

Kafka

Databricks

Job description

Okta is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to join the Data and Insights team in Illinois. You will architect, build, and maintain scalable data solutions and lead cross‑functional initiatives with product, analytics, and data science teams.

The role emphasizes data contracts, governance, and enabling trustworthy data for employee lifecycle analytics from recruiting through employment. Collaboration with HR data stakeholders and leadership is essential.