Sr. Data Engineer, PeopleInsights ; APIX

Position: Sr. Data Engineer, Amazon PeopleInsights eXperience (APIX)
Description Are you passionate about building scalable data infrastructure that powers critical business decisions? Do you thrive on solving complex data architecture challenges while mentoring engineers and driving technical excellence? If so, join the Amazon People Insights & Experience (APIX) team as a Senior Data Engineer! We're transforming Amazon's fragmented people-data ecosystem into a centralized, AI-ready platform through the PXT Data Strategy-a multi-year program consolidating 20 data lakes with 13,000+ data sources into a unified Central Lakehouse serving 440+ data teams.

As a Senior Data Engineer, you'll be instrumental in building the data infrastructure that enables self-service analytics, AI-powered insights, and data governance at massive scale. This is a hands-on technical leadership position where you will own team-level data architecture for flagship initiatives including the Central Lakehouse (achieving 100% Golden Dataset discoverability), Amazon Cortex (an intelligent data abstraction platform), and Clarity Metrics Marketplace (CMM)-reducing dataset onboarding time from 5-6 weeks to under 7 days.

You'll architect solutions that serve 16,000+ HR professionals, operations leaders, and people managers across Amazon, directly impacting how the company makes data-driven workforce decisions. We're looking for a top data engineer with deep expertise in distributed systems, data lake architectures, and a proven track record of delivering large-scale data solutions. You should excel at technical leadership, strategic thinking, and have genuine passion for building data infrastructure that scales to support hundreds of teams building metrics in parallel while maintaining Amazon's highest privacy and security standards.

Key job responsibilities Own Team Data Architecture & Drive Technical Excellence - Take ownership of team data architecture with system-wide perspective, anticipating data access patterns and proactively removing bottlenecks across the Central Lakehouse, Cortex, and CMM platforms - Design and deliver exemplary, large-scale data solutions that are secure, maintainable, scalable, and extensible-enabling others to easily contribute and build upon your work - Lead architectural improvements that simplify complex data systems, addressing deficiencies where your team's architecture bottlenecks other teams across PXT's 20 data lakes - Make appropriate architectural trade-offs (build vs.

buy, tiered storage strategies, data abstraction patterns) balancing short-term technology needs with long-term business requirements for Amazon's people data ecosystem - Solve Ambiguous Problems & Lead Technical Strategy - Work efficiently with limited guidance in ambiguous problem areas-where business problems are defined but technical strategies for Golden Dataset onboarding, metadata enrichment, and AI contextualization are not - Lead identification and resolution of complex data engineering challenges including data duplication across 264 redundant warehouses, inconsistent metric definitions, and governance gaps across federated data lakes - Influence team technical and business strategy for PXT Data Strategy work streams, bringing perspective and context for current and future technology choices in AWS-first data platform adoption - Build consensus when confronted with discordant views on data architecture approaches, demonstrating judgment on when to leverage existing solutions versus building new capabilities - Deliver High-Impact Data Solutions at Amazon Scale - Design and implement scalable data pipelines, ETL processes, and data abstraction layers supporting the Central Lakehouse (1,754+ Golden Datasets), Cortex Data Plane APIs, and self-service CMM capabilities - Architect solutions handling high volumes of people data across 17,000+ applications, optimizing for data quality, availability, latency, security, performance, and integrity - Reduce manual data preparation effort by 60-80% through intelligent data vending, contextualized metadata, and automated dataset onboarding workflows - Deliver data infrastructure supporting AI-powered insights (Clarity Assist, Quick Suite integration) with >90% query accuracy and