Senior Data Engineer, IT Enterprise Data Solutions
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
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Benefits offered by this job
Job summary
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is seeking a Senior Data Engineer in Seattle to design, build, operate, and refine secure, scalable data solutions on the Modern Data Platform. You will translate complex requirements into production pipelines and data products, collaborating with data engineers, analysts, and security experts.
You will help improve data availability, quality, and lineage for reporting, AI‑assisted discovery, and RAG use cases across the foundation and affiliates.
Qualifications
- Strong hands-on experience with modern data platforms and pipelines.
- Experience delivering production data solutions in enterprise environments.
- Proficiency with Azure Databricks, Snowflake, and dbt Cloud.
Responsibilities
- Design, build, test, deploy, and support ELT/ETL pipelines from multiple sources.
- Develop data products and dimensional models to support reporting and analytics.
- Implement data quality controls, observability, and security practices.
- Lead modernization toward lakehouse architectures and CI/CD for data workloads.
- Collaborate with AI, BI, and security teams to enable data‑driven insights.
Skills
Education
Tools
Job description
The Foundation We are the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. Founded on a simple premise: people everywhere, regardless of identity or circumstances, should have the chance to live healthy, productive lives. We believe our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve. We provide an exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, regional holidays, and opportunities to engage in several employee communities. As a workplace, we’re committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally.
As part of the IT Enterprise Data Solutions (EDS) department, the Data Engineering team’s mission is to lead on data technology and utilization, enabling informed decision‑making and strategic insights across the foundation. We are committed to providing a robust, secure, and scalable data platform that empowers data‑driven initiatives and cultivate collaboration. Working with our business operations and foundation strategy program partners, the team supports the management of the EDW, Enterprise Data Platform, building and integration of data systems, shared data exchange, data platform operations and data architecture support.
As a Senior Data Engineer, you will design, build, operate, and continuously improve secure, scalable, and reliable data solutions on the foundation’s Modern Data Platform. You will be a senior hands‑on engineer and domain expert who translates business and technical requirements into production‑ready pipelines, data products, models, and platform capabilities. You will work with data and AI engineers, business systems analysts, product owners, data analysts, BI engineers, security specialists, and service partners. Your work will improve the availability, quality, lineage, and usability of data for reporting, search, AI‑assisted knowledge discovery, retrieval‑augmented generation, and other data‑driven decision‑making across the foundation and its affiliates.
This is a Seattle based role.
- Design, develop, test, deploy, and support configuration‑driven ELT/ETL pipelines that acquire data from enterprise applications, databases, APIs, file repositories, partner data sources, and shared data exchanges.
- Build reusable ingestion and transformation patterns for structured, semi‑structured and unstructured data, including relational data, JSON, XML, CSV, Excel, and document metadata.
- Develop curated data products and dimensional models using star and snowflake techniques to support enterprise reporting, semantic models, analytics, and downstream operational use cases.
- Implement transformations using SQL, Python, Spark/PySpark, Databricks notebooks, dbt Cloud, Snowpark, and related cloud‑native engineering tools.
- Contribute hands‑on to modernization initiatives, including migration from legacy data warehouse and ETL patterns to lakehouse, cloud warehouse, and ELT‑based architectures.
- Monitor and optimize pipelines, storage, compute, and databases for performance, scalability, availability, and cost efficiency.
- Implement data quality controls, reconciliation, exception handling, observability, logging, alerting, and service‑level measures for critical data flows.
- Lead or support incident triage, root‑cause analysis, restoration, and follow‑through on preventive actions for production data services.
- Apply secure engineering practices including managed identity, role‑based access, encryption, secrets management, least‑privilege access, and sensitive‑data handling requirements.
- Implement and maintain CI/CD, automated testing, version control, release management, and environment promotion practices for data workloads.
- Engineer governed, high‑quality data and document pipelines that support enterprise search, AI‑assisted knowledge discovery, retrieval‑augmented generation, analytics, and data science use cases.
- Prepare and curate source data, metadata, permissions, lineage, and quality signals needed for reliable AI solutions while preserving source‑system security and access policies.
- Partner with Knowledge Management, AI, Business Intelligence, and Information Security teams to define fit‑for‑purpose data products for model grounding, evaluation, and responsible use.
- Help establish repeatable patterns for document ingestion, chunking‑ready content preparation, semantic metadata, and controlled data exchange across internal teams and affiliates.
- Evaluate emerging data and AI platform capabilities through proofs of concept and recommend adoption based on value, security, sustainability, and architectural fit.
- Conduct design and code reviews, contribute to engineering standards, and promote reusable patterns for data modeling, orchestration, testing, observability, and documentation.
- Collaborate with architects and product teams to clarify requirements, assess trade‑offs, estimate delivery, and convert solution designs into actionable implementation plans.
- Mentor data engineers and contingent staff through pairing, technical guidance, review, and knowledge sharing; may coordinate work across small delivery efforts.
- Create and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, data mappings, lineage, and operational procedures; contribute metadata and descriptions for synchronization with Collibra.
- Work effectively in Agile delivery teams using Scrum, Jira, and DevSecOps practices while communicating clearly with technical and non‑technical partners.
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, data engineering, information systems, or a related field, or equivalent combination of education and experience. Typically 7+ years of relevant data engineering experience in enterprise environments, including designing, delivering, and operating production data platforms and pipelines.
- Strong hands‑on expertise with Azure data services, Databricks, Snowflake, and dbt Cloud; experience with Azure Data Factory and Fivetran is strongly preferred.
- Advanced proficiency in SQL and Python, plus practical experience with Spark/PySpark or Scala and cloud scripting or automation.
- Experience implementing lakehouse, cloud data warehouse, ELT/ETL, and medallion or layered data architecture patterns.
- Demonstrated experience with dimensional modeling, data normalization, slowly changing dimensions, point‑in‑time history, and enterprise data quality practices.
- Experience building CI/CD pipelines for data workloads, automated testing, infrastructure‑as‑code or configuration‑as‑code, and modern version control workflows.
- Strong understanding of data security, privacy, access controls, encryption, lineage, retention, and governance in cloud data environments.
- Experience supporting analytics and semantic‑layer platforms such as Power BI, and working with metadata/governance platforms such as Collibra, is preferred.
- Demonstrated ability to enable AI through data, including an understanding of the architecture, quality, metadata, permissions, lineage, scalability, and evaluation requirements for search, RAG, and other AI use cases.
- Proven ability to diagnose production issues, lead technical problem solving, and implement short‑, medium‑, and long‑term corrective actions.
- Experience working with vendors or distributed engineering teams and reviewing deliverables for alignment with enterprise standards and maintainability.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, sound judgment, and the ability to explain complex technical concepts to varied audiences.
- A demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and respectful collaboration.
Must have unrestricted work authorization in the country where this position is located. The Foundation does not provide immigration‑related sponsorship for this role. This includes direct company sponsorship and any work authorization requiring a written submission or other immigration support from the company (eg: H‑1B, O‑1, L‑1, E, OPT, STEM‑OPT, CPT, TN, J‑1, etc.).
The salary range for this role is $157,400 to $236,000 USD. We recognize high‑wage market differences in Seattle and Washington D.C., where our offices are located. The range for this role in these locations is $173,100 to $259,700 USD. As a mission‑driven organization, we strive to balance competitive pay with our mission. New hires salaries are typically between the range minimum and the salary range midpoint. Actual placement in the range will depend on a candidate’s job‑related skills, experience, and expertise, as evaluated during the interview process.
As part of our standard hiring process for new employees, employment will be contingent upon successful completion of a background check.
We’re committed to providing an inclusive and accessible hiring experience for all candidates. If you have a disability or medical condition and need an accommodation at any stage of the application or interview process—such as an ASL interpreter, alternative interview format, or physical accessibility support we’re happy to help. Please contact HR@gatesfoundation.org with the position number and a brief description of your accommodation needs. Requests will be handled confidentially.
We are dedicated to the belief that all lives have equal value. We strive for a global and cultural workplace that supports ever greater diversity, equity, and inclusion - of voices, ideas, and approaches, and we support this diversity through all our employment practices. All applicants and employees who are drawn to serve our mission will enjoy equality of opportunity and fair treatment without regard to race, color, age, religion, pregnancy, sex, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, and prior protected activity. Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives. In developing countries, we work with partners to create impactful solutions so that people can take charge of their futures and achieve their full potential. In the United States, we aim to ensure that everyone- especially those with the fewest resources- has access to the opportunities needed to succeed in school and life.
Based in Seattle, Washington, the foundation is led by CEO Mark Suzman, under the direction of Bill Gates and our governing board.
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