
Principal Data Engineer
Role summary
Autodesk is seeking a Principal Data Engineer for its Enterprise Data Management team. This senior technical leadership role involves designing and delivering scalable data platform services, robust data products, and enterprise-wide data engineering standards. Responsibilities include acting as a technical leader and force multiplier across data engineering teams, defining architecture and standards, leading the design and delivery of data pipelines using cloud platforms like Snowflake and tools like dbt, driving DataOps maturity, and solving complex data engineering challenges. The role requires 10+ years of experience, deep expertise in SQL, dbt, Python, Snowflake, AWS, and IaC, with a track record of leading architecture and ensuring data quality and reliability.
Job Requisition ID #
26WD96683
Position Overview
We are hiring a Principal Data Engineer to join Autodesk’s Enterprise Data Management (EDM) team within the COO-GET organization. In this senior technical leadership role you will lead the design and delivery of scalable data platform services, robust data products, and enterprise-wide data engineering standards that power canonical records and analytics across the company. You will partner across product, platform, and business stakeholders to translate complex business needs into pragmatic, high-quality technical solutions and to raise engineering maturity across multiple teams. Familiarity with master data management, data enrichment, identity resolution, and data quality practices is a plus.
Responsibilities
- Act as a technical leader and force multiplier across multiple data engineering teams: coach, mentor, and raise the bar on code quality, testing, and delivery practices
- Define and own architecture and standards for data platform services, including data modeling, ETL/ELT patterns, metadata, and data governance
- Lead design and delivery of robust, performant data pipelines and data products using modern cloud data platforms (e.g., Snowflake), orchestration, and transformation tooling (dbt or similar)
- Drive DataOps maturity: testing frameworks, automated quality gates, CI/CD, observability, incident response, and runbooks for production data workloads
- Solve complex, enterprise-scale data engineering challenges (record reconciliation, identity/organizational hierarchies, lineage, scale/performance)
- Lead root-cause analysis and durable remediation for complex production incidents; enable teams to prevent recurrence
- Collaborate closely with product managers, data stewards, analytics, ML, and business stakeholders to prioritize high-impact initiatives and translate requirements into scalable engineering solutions
- Provide hands-on implementation as needed (POC, spike, or production work), and lead technical decision-making across teams
- Design and operationalize real-time/near-real-time data paths and evented architectures as appropriate to use cases.
Minimum Qualifications
- BS/MS in Computer Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
- 10+ years of hands-on software and data engineering experience in enterprise environments
- Deep, demonstrable expertise with SQL, hive, dbt, Python & Snowflake, and modern data engineering tooling (Snowflake and dbt or comparable technologies)
- Strong experience designing data models (conceptual, logical, physical) and optimizing query performance at scale
- Practical experience with data lake table formats and query engines (for example, Apache Hive, Apache Iceberg)
- Extensive AWS experience and comfortable designing solutions using cloud services and IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation)
- Track record of leading architecture and solution design for complex, cross-team systems
- Demonstrated ownership of data quality frameworks, observability, and production reliability for data workloads
- Excellent communication skills and experience influencing stakeholders across GEOs and functions
- Proven experience mentoring engineers and elevating team delivery practices.
Preferred Qualifications
- Prior experience in ingesting, aggregating, event streams, web & product analytics data
- Practical experience with streaming/event-driven architectures and stream processing frameworks (for example, Apache Flink)
- Familiarity with search/indexing systems and integrating with data APIs
- Experience operationalizing ML/AI or GenAI capabilities on enterprise data platforms
Learn More
About Autodesk
Welcome to Autodesk! Amazing things are created every day with our software – from the greenest buildings and cleanest cars to the smartest factories and biggest hit movies. We help innovators turn their ideas into reality, transforming not only how things are made, but what can be made.
We take great pride in our culture here at Autodesk – it’s at the core of everything we do. Our culture guides the way we work and treat each other, informs how we connect with customers and partners, and defines how we show up in the world.
When you’re an Autodesker, you can do meaningful work that helps build a better world designed and made for all. Ready to shape the world and your future? Join us!
Benefits
From health and financial benefits to time away and everyday wellness, we give Autodeskers the best, so they can do their best work. Learn more about our benefits in the U.S. by visiting
https://benefits.autodesk.com/
Salary transparency
Salary is one part of Autodesk’s competitive compensation package. For U.S.-based roles, we expect a starting base salary between $128,000 and $229,900. Offers are based on the candidate’s experience and geographic location, and may exceed this range. In addition to base salaries, our compensation package may include annual cash bonuses, commissions for sales roles, stock grants, and a comprehensive benefits package.
Equal Employment Opportunity
At Autodesk, we're building a diverse workplace and an inclusive culture to give more people the chance to imagine, design, and make a better world. Autodesk is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and considers all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status or any other legally protected characteristic. We also consider for employment all qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with applicable law.
Diversity & Belonging
We take pride in cultivating a culture of belonging where everyone can thrive. Learn more here:
https://www.autodesk.com/company/diversity-and-belonging
Are you an existing contractor or consultant with Autodesk?
Please search for open jobs and apply internally (not on this external site).
Sample Autodesk interview questions
- 1
Design a distributed rate limiter.
system designmedium - 2
Outline the components of a distributed A/B testing system that ensures statistical validity and prevents experiment collision.
system designmedium - 3
Reverse Nodes in k-Group Reverse nodes in k-group in a linked list. Input: head = [1,2,3,4,5], k = 3 Output: [3,2,1,4,5] Explanation: The first 3 elements are reversed, while the remaining 2 are left untouched since they don't form a complete group.
codingmedium - 4
Split an array into consecutive subsequences. Input: nums = [1,2,3,4,4,5] Output: FALSE Explanation: The numbers can form [1,2,3,4], but the remaining leftover group [4,5] is too short to form a valid sequence of length 3.
codingmedium - 5
Count the number of anagrammatic substrings from one string present in another. Input: s = "abab", p = "ab" Output: [0, 1, 2] Explanation: The substrings "ab", "ba", and "ab" starting at indices 0, 1, and 2 respectively are all anagrams of the string "ab".
codingmedium
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