Senior Loyalty Data Architect & Analytics Engineer

El Pollo Loco, Inc.; Costa Mesa (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Great Place to Work culture

Medical, Dental, Vision

HSA Savings

401K with match

Paid time off

Employee discounts

Bonus potential

Job summary

El Pollo Loco, Inc. seeks a Senior Data Engineer to own loyalty and customer spend data, turning it into reliable insights for leadership. You will design and deliver data solutions from ingestion to reporting, collaborating with business teams and external vendors to improve data quality and analytics capabilities.

You will lead data architecture, governance, and scalable pipelines, applying AI/ML techniques to expand analytics while ensuring security and cost effectiveness as EPL grows.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of data engineering/architecture experience with production data platforms.
• Expert-level SQL and modern ETL/ELT practices.
• Hands-on with cloud data warehouses (Snowflake or equivalent).
• Data governance and modeling to ensure analytics integrity.
• Experience with LLMs and AI integration in analytics workflows.
• Experience with loyalty, customer, or transactional data preferred.

Responsibilities

• Frame business problems with Marketing, Finance, Operations to translate data needs.
• Design and deliver end-to-end data solutions for loyalty, customer, and transaction data.
• Own data pipelines, ingestion flows, and analytical models.
• Define data architecture and governance aligned with security and cost.
• Collaborate with vendors and external data providers for integrations.
• Establish data contracts and reusable transformation patterns.
• Improve pipelines with monitoring, alerting, and self-healing processing.
• Apply AI/ML techniques and LLMs to expand analytics capabilities.
• Modernize ingestion frameworks to support growth.

Skills

SQL

ETL/ELT

Snowflake

Data pipelines

Data modeling

LLMs

AI integration

Education

Bachelor's degree in IT/CS

Tools

Snowflake

Airflow

Job description

El Pollo Loco, Inc. seeks a Senior Data Engineer to own loyalty and customer spend data, turning it into reliable insights for leadership. You will design and deliver data solutions from ingestion to reporting, collaborating with business teams and external vendors to improve data quality and analytics capabilities.

You will lead data architecture, governance, and scalable pipelines, applying AI/ML techniques to expand analytics while ensuring security and cost effectiveness as EPL grows.