Senior Staff Data Platform Engineer

Qualcomm; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 167,000 - 252,000; Full time

Job summary

Join Qualcomm as a Senior Staff Data Platform Engineer in San Diego to lead and mentor a team while implementing cutting-edge data solutions. This role involves overseeing the infrastructure and tools for managing the data lifecycle, working closely with fellow engineers to enhance security and efficiency in a dynamic environment. Candidates should have extensive experience in AWS, data engineering best practices, and cloud infrastructure management.

Benefits

Competitive annual discretionary bonus

Annual RSU grants

Comprehensive benefits package

Qualifications

• 10+ years building and operating large-scale cloud platforms, 5+ years in data-centric roles.
• Expert-level hands-on experience with AWS services and multi-account environments.
• Mastery of Terraform/Terragrunt for complex deployments.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the technical expert for the data platform team, mentoring engineers.
• Implement and maintain AWS environments according to architectural guidelines.
• Build and maintain end-to-end data flows using industry best practices.

Skills

Data Engineering

AWS

Terraform

CI/CD automation

Kubernetes

Python

Bash scripting

Observability

Security Best Practices

Education

AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional

Tools

Databricks

GitHub Actions

Jenkins

Job description

Join to apply for the Senior Staff Data Platform Engineer role at Qualcomm

Join to apply for the Senior Staff Data Platform Engineer role at Qualcomm

Get AI-powered advice on this job and more exclusive features.

Job Area

Information Technology Group, Information Technology Group > Enterprise Architecture

Company

Qualcomm Incorporated

Job Area

Information Technology Group, Information Technology Group > Enterprise Architecture

General Summary

We are seeking an experienced and highly skilled Senior Staff Data Platform Engineer to join our dynamic team. A Data Platform Engineer designs, builds, and maintains the infrastructure and tools that support an organization's data lifecycle. This includes designing data pipelines, managing data storage, and implementing data governance practices. You will work closely with data scientists, analysts, and developers to ensure data quality, security, and accessibility. In this senior role, you will also mentor junior engineers and contribute to strategic decisions regarding data infrastructure. Ideal candidates will see the big picture and understand how different parts of the system interact and influence each other.

Qualifications

• Deep Technical Expertise: 10+ years building and operating large-scale cloud platforms with 5+ years focused specifically on data-centric DevOps/SRE/DataOps roles.
• AWS Implementation Experience: Expert-level hands-on experience with AWS services (networking, IAM, security services) with demonstrated ability to implement and maintain multi-account environments.
• Databricks Excellence: Hands-on experience with the complete Databricks Lakehouse Platform, including Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, and MLflow.
• Infrastructure as Code: Mastery of Terraform/Terragrunt (or Crossplane/Pulumi) for complex, multi-environment deployments.
• CI/CD Automation: Proven track record building and optimizing CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, Jenkins) for applications, infrastructure, and data artifacts.
• Programming Proficiency: Advanced Python and Bash scripting skills.
• Kubernetes Operations: Hands-on EKS cluster management, Helm packaging experience.
• Reliability Engineering: Demonstrated experience implementing and monitoring SLIs/SLOs for both system reliability and data quality/freshness.
• Strong understanding of security best practices: Implement and maintain security measures to protect systems and data.
• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional: Certification validating advanced technical expertise in provisioning, operating, and managing distributed application systems on AWS.
  
  
  

Key Responsibilities

Platform Implementation & Technical Leadership

• Serve as the technical implementation expert for our data platform team, mentoring engineers on operational best practices.
• Implement and maintain "golden path" templates defined by the architecture team.
• Document implementation details and operational procedures that bring architectural designs to life.
• Establish coding standards, review processes, and SLOs that ensure operational excellence.
• Promote systems thinking. Understand and improve how different components of the system interact and align with organizational goals.
  
  
  

Cloud Infrastructure Implementation & Operations

• Implement multi-account AWS environments according to architectural guidelines.
• Execute infrastructure-as-code deployments at scale with Terraform/Terragrunt, ensuring repeatability, auditability, and drift prevention.
• Operate and optimize high-availability EKS clusters that power critical data services.
• Configure and maintain Databricks workspaces with advanced governance controls, managing the entire resource lifecycle.
  
  
  

Data Engineering & Pipeline Implementation

• Implement end-to-end data flows according to defined data architecture patterns.
• Build and harden enterprise-grade ingestion workflows using Fivetran Hybrid/HVR, ensuring reliable source-to-lake transfer.
• Build and maintain unified CI/CD pipelines that validate code, notebooks, SQL transformations, and ML artifacts.
• Implement comprehensive testing frameworks for data pipelines (unit, integration, and data quality).
  
  
  

Observability & Reliability Operations

• Deploy and maintain our observability stack leveraging Acceldata and open standards, e.g., OpenTelemetry.
• Implement and monitor service level indicators (SLIs) for data freshness, completeness, and quality.
• Manage data lineage tracking systems to ensure full transparency of data flow.
• Implement error budgeting and SLO frameworks specifically tuned for data workloads.
• Implement and oversee observability solutions: Establish monitoring and alerting systems to ensure the health and performance of applications and infrastructure.
  
  
  

Security & Compliance Implementation

• Implement security controls that satisfy SOX, GDPR, and industry-specific requirements.
• Configure vulnerability scanning for all platform components.
• Implement IAM policies based on least-privilege principles with appropriate separation of duties.
• Build automated evidence collection systems that simplify audit processes.
• Implement security guardrails through policy-as-code (OPA, Checkov) across all deployment environments.
  
  
  

Kubernetes & Serverless Operations

• Manage production EKS clusters running critical data workloads.
• Tune Kubernetes autoscaling, resource allocation, and pod security policies.
• Optimize Databricks serverless compute for cost-effectiveness and performance.
• Implement sophisticated cost allocation and chargeback mechanisms.
  
  
  

Incident Management & Reliability Improvement

• Lead on-call rotations with a focus on knowledge sharing and systematic improvement.
• Conduct thorough, blameless post-mortems that drive meaningful architecture improvements.
• Manage error budgets for platform components and data pipelines, making appropriate reliability trade-offs.
• Develop playbooks and automation to reduce MTTR for common failure scenarios.
• Oversee troubleshooting process and serve as a point of contact for highly complex issues, monitor SLAs, and address issues.
  
  
  

Strategic Planning & Leadership

• Develop and execute a long-term vision for the organization's DevOps practices, aligning them with business goals.
• Demonstrate business acumen: Make informed decisions that consider the financial and strategic impact on the organization.
• Display thought leadership: Identify the state of system solutions, approaches, or other technical information and compare against industry standards to identify opportunities for improvement.
  
  
  

Communication & Influence

• Use verbal and written communication skills to convey complex and/or detailed information to multiple individuals/audiences with differing knowledge levels. Role may require strong negotiation and influence, communication to large groups or high-level constituents.
• Lead and mentor other technical resources to disseminate subject matter expertise across IT by leading internal and/or external brown bags or tech talks.
  
  
  

Independent Work & Decision Making

• Work independently with no supervision.
• Take responsibility for own work and make decisions with significant impact, influencing overall program or project success, finances, and/or the ability to meet objectives; errors are not readily apparent due to the complexity of work process/product or time between decisions and results; errors typically result in significant expenditure of time, resources, and funds to correct.
  
  
  

Mentorship & Knowledge Sharing

• Serve as the technical implementation expert for our data platform team, mentoring engineers on operational best practices.
  
  
  

Applicants: Qualcomm is an equal opportunity employer. If you are an individual with a disability and need an accommodation during the application/hiring process, rest assured that Qualcomm is committed to providing an accessible process. You may e-mail [e-mail] or call Qualcomm's toll-free number found here. Upon request, Qualcomm will provide reasonable accommodations to support individuals with disabilities to be able participate in the hiring process. Qualcomm is also committed to making our workplace accessible for individuals with disabilities. (Keep in mind that this email address is used to provide reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities. We will not respond here to requests for updates on applications or resume inquiries).

To all Staffing and Recruiting Agencies: Our Careers Site is only for individuals seeking a job at Qualcomm. Staffing and recruiting agencies and individuals being represented by an agency are not authorized to use this site or to submit profiles, applications or resumes, and any such submissions will be considered unsolicited. Qualcomm does not accept unsolicited resumes or applications from agencies. Please do not forward resumes to our jobs alias, Qualcomm employees or any other company location. Qualcomm is not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes/applications.

EEO Employer: Qualcomm is an equal opportunity employer; all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or any other protected classification.

Qualcomm expects its employees to abide by all applicable policies and procedures, including but not limited to security and other requirements regarding protection of Company confidential information and other confidential and/or proprietary information, to the extent those requirements are permissible under applicable law.

Pay Range And Other Compensation & Benefits

$167,800.00 - $251,600.00

The above pay scale reflects the broad, minimum to maximum, pay scale for this job code for the location for which it has been posted. Even more importantly, please note that salary is only one component of total compensation at Qualcomm. We also offer a competitive annual discretionary bonus program and opportunity for annual RSU grants (employees on sales-incentive plans are not eligible for our annual bonus). In addition, our highly competitive benefits package is designed to support your success at work, at home, and at play. Your recruiter will be happy to discuss all that Qualcomm has to offer – and you can review more details about our US benefits at this link.

If you would like more information about this role, please contact Qualcomm Careers.

3076182

Seniority level

• Seniority level

  Not Applicable

Employment type

• Employment type

  Full-time

Job function

• Job function

  Other

• Industries

  Telecommunications

Referrals increase your chances of interviewing at Qualcomm by 2x

Software Platform Tools, Principal Engineer

Staff Software Developer - AI DevOps Engineer

Senior Software Cloud and Data Development Engineer

Automotive - Platform Software Engineer (Staff-Sr. Staff Position)

Del Mar, CA $95,000.00-$105,000.00 4 days ago

We’re unlocking community knowledge in a new way. Experts add insights directly into each article, started with the help of AI.