Strategic Data Engineering Lead — Client-Facing & Growth

Thoughtworks; City of Amsterdam (NY); Hybrid; USD 139,000 - 209,000; Full time

Job summary

Thoughtworks seeks Principal Data Engineer leaders to drive data engineering initiatives for clients, combining deep technical mastery with strategic business alignment.

You will lead a senior team, influence outcomes, and travel to client sites as needed, shaping data platforms, governance and production deployment. You remain hands-on while guiding delivery and growth in the market.

Qualifications

• Extensive pre-sales experience with independently driving complex pursuits.
• Hands-on in one or two core technologies alongside leading a team.
• Experience in Domain-Driven Design for enterprise contexts.
• Big-data architectures, building and operating data pipelines, and distributed storage.
• Deep understanding of data modeling and modern data engineering tools and platforms, including cloud warehousing.
• Experience designing real-time, low-latency streaming solutions (cloud and on-prem).
• Experience with data governance and security policies; knowledge of MLOps and data science concepts.

Responsibilities

• Clarify requirements with sales and pre-sales; design viable solutions for complex pursuits with executive stakeholders.
• Establish a clear vision for data paradigm and practices aligned with business strategy.
• Collaborate with executives to understand strategic objectives and leverage data for insights.
• Provide client-facing technical leadership as a data domain expert.
• Design and develop intricate data processing pipelines; address client problems.
• Collaborate with data scientists to design scalable model production.
• Write clean, iterative code using TDD; enable deployment and operation of data pipelines.
• Lead data governance, security, and privacy initiatives to support compliance.
• Grow capability by mentoring engineers and expanding the team; lead through influence and thought leadership.

Skills

Pre-sales

Data architectures

Data pipelines

DD design

Real-time streaming

MLOps knowledge

Data governance

Security & privacy

Leadership

Hands-on coding

Tools

Cloud warehousing tools

Distributed processing platforms

Job description

Thoughtworks seeks Principal Data Engineer leaders to drive data engineering initiatives for clients, combining deep technical mastery with strategic business alignment.

You will lead a senior team, influence outcomes, and travel to client sites as needed, shaping data platforms, governance and production deployment. You remain hands-on while guiding delivery and growth in the market.