Principal Data Engineer, Product Data & Insights

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

Job summary

Okta's Principal Data Engineer role, within the Data and Insights team, focuses on architecting, building, and maintaining scalable data solutions that power product insights. You will collaborate with product engineers, analytics, and data scientists to ensure data availability and integrity at scale.

As a senior member, you will mentor engineers, drive data governance and contracts, and shape long-term architectural direction by adopting emerging technologies that unlock business impact.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in data engineering, senior/lead capacity; federal compliance/security desirable.
• Deep expertise in product behavioral data engineering and telemetry for launch analysis, usage and retention.
• Proven experience partnering with Product Eng teams on instrumentation for data collection.
• Expert-level SQL, ETL/ELT (Airflow, dbt) and MPP databases (Snowflake, Redshift) with hands-on AWS (S3, Lambda, EMR, ECR, EKS).
• Lakehouse architectures (Databricks) and file formats (Iceberg, Delta).

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve high-scale data solutions serving as reference architecture.
• Develop data quality frameworks, governance, lineage, and change management for externally reported numbers.
• Drive consistent data modeling, naming conventions, documentation, and metric governance.
• Lead cross-functional data initiatives to accelerate delivery and harden data systems.
• Navigate ambiguity and balance short-term delivery with long-term infrastructure.
• Champion Data Contracts and schema evolution across global teams.
• Mentor senior engineers and foster a culture of data-driven decision making.
• Stay ahead of data landscape with emerging technologies and practices.

Skills

SQL

Telemetry data

Product instrumentation

Leadership

Data governance

AWS

Databricks

Tools

Airflow

dbt

Snowflake

Redshift

S3

Lambda

EMR

ECR

EKS

Job description

Okta's Principal Data Engineer role, within the Data and Insights team, focuses on architecting, building, and maintaining scalable data solutions that power product insights. You will collaborate with product engineers, analytics, and data scientists to ensure data availability and integrity at scale.

As a senior member, you will mentor engineers, drive data governance and contracts, and shape long-term architectural direction by adopting emerging technologies that unlock business impact.