SAP/ERP Transformation - Lead Data Engineer

ViziRecruiter,LLC.; Salisbury, Northern (NC, KY); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work schedule

Core Salisbury, NC location

Competitive compensation

Job summary

Ahold Delhaize USA is seeking an enterprise data platform leader to define vision, architecture, and operating model for data platforms and data products that accelerate analytics, reporting, and ML across the business.

The role is hybrid with 3 in-person days at Salisbury, NC, and 2 remote days; requires 12+ years in data/platform engineering and expertise in Databricks, lakehouse patterns, CI/CD, security, and governance.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent years of work experience.
• 12+ years in data/platform engineering with enterprise scope and measurable impact.
• Mastery of data architecture (streaming and batch), lake/lakehouse/warehouse patterns, governance, and security.
• Proven leadership of automation, CI/CD for data, and observability at scale.
• Executive level communication, influence, and stakeholder alignment.
• Deep expertise with Databricks and modern lakehouse architecture, including Spark-based processing, Delta Lake, orchestration, governance, performance optimization, and production operations.
• Demonstrated experience designing, building, testing, and operating scalable batch and real-time data pipelines using SQL and a modern programming language such as Python or Scala.
• Strong knowledge of REST APIs, event-driven architectures, and streaming technologies such as Kafka or comparable platforms.
• Strong background in reporting and analytics, including data modeling and delivery of trusted, analytics-ready datasets for enterprise consumption.
• Proven ability to communicate complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences, manage stakeholders, influence across teams, and serve as a bridge among engineering, business, and transformation teams.
• Practical interest and experience in AI, Generative AI, and emerging technologies, supported by a demonstrated passion for continuous learning.

Responsibilities

• Set the north star data architecture (batch/streaming, lakehouse, MDM, governance) and establish actionable standards, guardrails, and reference implementations.
• Establish product-oriented platform capabilities (self-service ingestion, transformation, orchestration, catalog/lineage, quality) and the internal tooling that enables scalable developer and analyst workflows.
• Define and drive automation standards, including CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows for data platforms and services.
• Embed security, privacy, and compliance by design, leveraging automation to enforce policies and produce audit-ready evidence.
• Orchestrate reliability and observability across pipelines and platforms (SLOs, cost/performance telemetry, automated remediation), including platform-wide monitoring, logging, and tracing practices (e.g., DataDog).
• Guide cloud service integration and container/orchestration strategy where applicable, ensuring cost-effective scale and predictable performance.
• Maintain and govern infrastructure as code practices (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation) to standardize environments, reduce drift, and improve repeatability.
• Prioritize roadmaps and investments using measurable value, risk reduction, and customer (data consumer) outcomes; evaluate and adopt new technologies to improve platform capabilities.
• Collaborate with development teams to provide reusable infrastructure components, golden paths, and platform patterns that accelerate delivery.
• Mentor principal and senior engineers, grow a community of practice, and raise engineering quality.

Skills

Databricks

Data architecture

Lakehouse

CI/CD for data

Python/Scala

REST APIs

Kafka

AI/Generative AI

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Databricks

SAP Business Data Cloud

SAP Datasphere

Delta Lake

Terraform

Unity Catalog

Job description

Introduction

Ahold Delhaize USA, a division of global food retailer Ahold Delhaize, is part of the U.S. family of brands, which also includes five leading omnichannel grocery brands – Food Lion, Giant Food, The GIANT Company, Hannaford and Stop & Shop. Ahold Delhaize USA associates support the brands with a wide range of services, including Finance, Legal, Sustainability, Commercial, Digital and E-commerce, Technology and more.

Overview

Enterprise level technical leader who defines the vision, architecture, and operating model for data platforms and data products, enabling secure, scalable, and reliable data solutions that accelerate analytics, reporting, and machine learning across the business. This hands-on leader acts as a conduit between enterprise data engineering teams and the Transformation organization, remaining highly technical while building frameworks, guiding team direction, architecture, and best practices.

*Our flexible/hybrid work schedule includes 3 in-person days at one of our core locations and 2 remote days. Our core office location for this role is Salisbury, NC.

*Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis.

Responsibilities

• Set the north star data architecture (batch/streaming, lakehouse, MDM, governance) and establish actionable standards, guardrails, and reference implementations.
• Establish product-oriented platform capabilities (self-service ingestion, transformation, orchestration, catalog/lineage, quality) and the internal tooling that enables scalable developer and analyst workflows.
• Define and drive automation standards, including CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows for data platforms and services.
• Embed security, privacy, and compliance by design, leveraging automation to enforce policies and produce audit-ready evidence.
• Orchestrate reliability and observability across pipelines and platforms (SLOs, cost/performance telemetry, automated remediation), including platform-wide monitoring, logging, and tracing practices (e.g., DataDog).
• Guide cloud service integration and container/orchestration strategy where applicable, ensuring cost-effective scale and predictable performance.
• Maintain and govern infrastructure as code practices (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation) to standardize environments, reduce drift, and improve repeatability.
• Prioritize roadmaps and investments using measurable value, risk reduction, and customer (data consumer) outcomes; evaluate and adopt new technologies to improve platform capabilities.
• Collaborate with development teams to provide reusable infrastructure components, golden paths, and platform patterns that accelerate delivery.
• Mentor principal and senior engineers, grow a community of practice, and raise engineering quality.
• May be called upon to support critical escalations and must be available during urgent IT incidents as needed.
• Design and build reusable data engineering frameworks and standards used across multiple squads to improve consistency, scalability, and delivery quality.
• Develop, manage, and optimize scalable pipelines that move data from SAP and legacy platforms into the enterprise data lake and deliver trusted data for reporting, analytics, AI, application and business consumption.
• Harmonize and transform data from disparate legacy systems into SAP while maintaining appropriate data quality, lineage, governance, and reconciliation controls.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership for Microsoft Data Ecosystem, Databricks and SAP Business Data Cloud solutions, including architecture decisions, implementation guidance, proof-of-concepts, and performance optimization.
• Drive the Reporting & Analytics engineering strategy and design API-driven and event-streaming solutions that enable secure, reliable, and timely access to enterprise data products.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent years of work experience.
• 12+ years in data/platform engineering with enterprise scope and measurable impact.
• Mastery of data architecture (streaming and batch), lake/lakehouse/warehouse patterns, governance, and security.
• Proven leadership of automation, CI/CD for data, and observability at scale.
• Executive level communication, influence, and stakeholder alignment.
• Deep expertise with Databricks and modern lakehouse architecture, including Spark-based processing, Delta Lake, orchestration, governance, performance optimization, and production operations.
• Demonstrated experience designing, building, testing, and operating scalable batch and real-time data pipelines using SQL and a modern programming language such as Python or Scala.
• Strong knowledge of REST APIs, event-driven architectures, and streaming technologies such as Kafka or comparable platforms.
• Strong background in reporting and analytics, including data modeling and delivery of trusted, analytics-ready datasets for enterprise consumption.
• Proven ability to communicate complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences, manage stakeholders, influence across teams, and serve as a bridge among engineering, business, and transformation teams.
• Practical interest and experience in AI, Generative AI, and emerging technologies, supported by a demonstrated passion for continuous learning.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience productizing internal data platforms and measuring adoption/value.
• Exposure to cost governance (FinOps) and multi cloud strategies.
• Hands-on experience with SAP Business Data Cloud, Databricks, SAP Datasphere, or integration of SAP data products with an enterprise Databricks environment.
• Experience supporting a large-scale SAP S/4HANA transformation and harmonizing data between legacy platforms, SAP, and enterprise analytical environments.
• Databricks Data Engineer Professional certification or a comparable advanced cloud, data engineering, SAP, or architecture certification.
• Experience with Delta Sharing, Unity Catalog, Lakeflow, Auto Loader, production-grade streaming workloads, and AI-ready or Generative AI data products.
• Experience partnering with system integrators and shaping reporting and analytics strategy across multiple business domains or squads.

Salary Range NC: $160,000 - $240,000

Actual compensation offered to a candidate may vary based on their unique qualifications and experience, internal equity, and market conditions. Final compensation decisions will be made in accordance with company policies and applicable laws.