Principal Data Engineer - Databricks

Company Alaska Airlines The Team

Guided by our purpose, core values, and leadership principles, we are creating an airline people love. Our corporate teams set the strategies and operational plans to ensure the success of our company. Whether we use our expertise in accounting, human resources, finance, planning, legal, marketing, or any of our operational divisions, our shared passion for travel and our guests is what motivates us to achieve excellence each day.

If you share our passion for creating an airline people love, we want to hear from you.

The Principal Data Engineer is the sole subject matter expert in designing, optimizing, implementing and advancing Alaska Air Group’s Enterprise Data platform using Databricks. As an individual contributor, this role defines long-term strategy for driving innovation, mentoring teams, partnering on the best technical implementation of Databricks, and ensuring the platform is scalable, secure, and aligned with Business and ITS goals.

• Act as lead subject matter expert in designing and implementing high-performance batch or real-time data pipelines using Apache Spark, Delta Live Tables, and Structured Streaming on Databricks.
• Collaborate with data scientists, analysts, and engineering teams to deliver robust, production grade solutions.
• Define and enforce best practices for workspace governance, job orchestration, and CI/CD integration.
• Optimize cluster configurations, spark parameters, and job execution plans for cost efficiency and speed.
• Evaluate and implement new Databricks features to enhance platform capabilities. Champion the usage and raise awareness of these new features across the teams.
• Exercise considerable latitude and initiative to troubleshoot and resolve performance bottlenecks, memory issues, and streaming latency challenges.
• Lead development and mentor engineers on real-time streaming solutions, spark internals, delta table optimization strategies, and advanced debugging techniques.
• Implement and manage Unity Catalog for centralized governance, data lineage, and fine-grained access control.
• Monitor Databricks costs, identify, evaluate and drive implementation for cost reduction opportunities.
• Lead efforts to standardize tagging and metadata practices across the AAG Databricks environment to improve cost attribution, accountability, and reporting.
• Focus on continuous improvement in system reliability through automation and monitoring, including implementation of automated unit testing. Document and create best practices for the development of future teams.
• Collaborate directly with Enterprise Architecture and Security to develop and plan the platforms architecture and security strategies.
• Act as a forward thinker to help ensure that new capabilities are evaluated, implemented, and operationalized.

Required

• 7 years of experience in data engineering, big data platforms, and analytics, including independent work on large-scale data architectures or a related area.
• Bachelor’s degree, or an additional two years of relevant training/experience in lieu of this degree.
• Expert-level proficiency in Databricks, Apache Spark.
• Deep understanding of Databricks configurations and hands-on experience with real-time streaming using Structured Streaming and Delta Live tables.
• Strong coding skills with Python, SQL and PySpark.
• Expert knowledge and experience in Infrastructure as Code (ARM, Terraform) and CI/CD pipeline (Azure Dev Ops and/or Git Hub preferred)
• Proven ability to optimize data pipelines for performance, reliability, and cost.
• Familiarity with Unity Catalog, Lakehouse Federation.
• Ability to work collaboratively with cross functional teams to understand objectives, gather automation requirements, write technical specifications, and perform in a lead role.
• Experience with Kafka.
• Excellent communication skills and a proven ability to collaborate or contribute to technical debate and design choices with a variety of team members.
• High school diploma or equivalent.
• Minimum age of 18.
• Must be authorized to work in the U.S.

Preferred

• Familiarity with Azure, MLflow.
• Certifications such as Databricks Certified Data Engineer Professional or Azure Solutions Architect Expert.
• Experience in Agile (Scrum) or Kanban development methodologies.
• Experience estimating effort and establishing timelines for projects.
• Experience conveying knowledge to diverse groups of people, such as classes, brown bag meetings, or seminars to ensure a consistent application of standards is established.

Embody our values to own safety, do the right thing, be caring and kind, and deliver performance.

Pay will be based on multiple factors, including and not limited to location, relevant experience/level and skillset while balancing internal equity relative to other Alaska/Hawaiian/Horizon employees. Alaska/Hawaiian/Horizon is committed to fair, unbiased…