Senior Data Engineer - Loyalty Analytics & Insights

El Pollo Loco; Costa Mesa (CA); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 143,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical + Dental + Vision Insurance +

HSA Savings Account

401(K) Retirement Plan with company 2x

Job summary

El Pollo Loco is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to own loyalty and customer spend data, turning it into reliable, actionable insights for leadership. This hybrid role based in Costa Mesa collaborates across Marketing, Finance, Operations, internal technology teams, and external vendors to improve data integrity and the architecture behind key decisions.

This is a strategic position focused on building and modernizing the pipelines, models, and governance mechanisms that support analytics across

Qualifications

• 8+ years of progressive experience in data engineering, data architecture, or analytics engineering.
• Expert-level SQL and strong experience with modern ETL/ELT practices and data processing.
• Hands-on experience with cloud data warehouse platforms (e.g., Snowflake).
• Experience with data governance and data modeling to ensure data integrity across analytics and reporting.
• Ability to independently design, build, and deliver solutions from ambiguous problems.

Responsibilities

• Partner with stakeholders to translate business questions into data requirements and bring solutions from concept to production.
• Own end-to-end data solutions with architectural trade-off decisions and delivery ownership.
• Design, build, and maintain data pipelines, ingestion flows, and analytical models for loyalty and transactional data.
• Define data architecture for the domain, ensuring security, scalability, and cost effectiveness.
• Collaborate with external vendors to define integrations and maintain data quality and delivery.
• Establish data contracts and reusable transformation patterns; drive data governance improvements.
• Apply AI/ML techniques to expand analytics capabilities and automate insights.

Skills

SQL

ETL/ELT

Data Architecture

Data Governance

AI in Analytics

Cloud Data Warehousing

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's degree in Information Technology or Computer Science

Tools

Snowflake

LLMs

Agentic Frameworks

Job description

El Pollo Loco is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to own loyalty and customer spend data, turning it into reliable, actionable insights for leadership. This hybrid role based in Costa Mesa collaborates across Marketing, Finance, Operations, internal technology teams, and external vendors to improve data integrity and the architecture behind key decisions.

This is a strategic position focused on building and modernizing the pipelines, models, and governance mechanisms that support analytics across