Principal, Data Engineer

Position: (USA) Principal, Data Engineer
Position Summary...

What you'll do...

Principal Data Engineer - Agentic Data Platforms

The Mission

As a Principal Data Engineer, you are the enterprise-scale technical authority responsible for shaping and evolving Sam's Club's data platform architecture to power intelligent, autonomous systems at scale.

Your mission is to architect and steward the foundational data systems that enable AI agents, copilots, and large-scale analytics to operate with reliability, semantic clarity, and enterprise-grade trust.

You do not simply build systems-you define how the organization builds systems.

About the Team

Sam's Club is a membership warehouse club serving millions of members with high-quality products and services at unmatched value. From Scan & Go and Club Pickup to Pharmacy, Travel, and Business Services, Sam's operates at enterprise scale across digital and physical channels.

The Data organization powers this ecosystem through scalable platforms that enable real-time decision-making, personalization, automation, and agentic AI innovation.

What You'll Do

Define Enterprise Data Architecture

* Architect and evolve the core data platform strategy across batch, streaming, and hybrid systems to support both traditional analytics and AI-native workloads.

* Establish and steward architectural standards that unify structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data across domains.

Lead Agentic Data Enablement

* Define enterprise patterns for agent-ready data, ensuring systems are discoverable, semantically rich, and optimized for LLMs, copilots, and multi-agent workflows.

* Shape reference architectures for RAG, real-time feature pipelines, vector indexing, and graph-augmented reasoning.

Drive Cross-Domain Platform Strategy

* Partner with Engineering, AI/ML, Product, and Platform leaders to align roadmaps with long-term autonomous decision-making goals.

* Influence and guide multiple teams in adopting scalable patterns without direct authority.

Architect for Trust, Reliability, and Scale

* Define standards for observability, telemetry, lineage, governance, and AI auditability across enterprise data systems.

* Design resilient, fault-tolerant systems that support millions of users and mission-critical retail operations.

Modernize Legacy Systems

* Lead modernization initiatives that transform traditional data lake systems into composable, event-driven, and agent-aware platforms.

* Balance short-term delivery with long-term scalability and maintainability.

Elevate Technical Excellence

* Mentor and guide Staff Engineers and Senior Engineers.

* Lead design reviews and steward architectural decisions across high-risk, high-impact initiatives.

* Raise the technical bar for the organization through principled engineering standards.

What You'll Bring

Enterprise-Scale Experience

* 10-15+ years building and evolving large-scale distributed data platforms.

* Proven track record of shaping architecture across multiple domains or organizations.

Deep Data Platform Expertise

* Strong experience in cloud-native ecosystems (GCP or Azure preferred), including Big Query, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, or equivalent.

* Expertise across batch and streaming systems (Kafka, Spark Structured Streaming, Flink, Druid, etc.).

* Experience designing hybrid real-time + analytical architectures.

Agentic & AI-Ready Systems Knowledge

* Strong understanding of semantic modeling, embeddings, knowledge graphs, and vector search.

* Experience designing data systems that support RAG, context enrichment, and agent orchestration.

* Ability to reason about schema, latency, storage format, and their impact on AI reasoning quality.

Governance & Observability Leadership

* Advanced knowledge of data quality frameworks, access control, lineage, compliance, and auditability.

* Experience defining trust and safety standards for AI-enabled systems.

Strong Engineering Foundation

* Fluency in Python, Java, or Scala.

* Deep experience with Spark/PySpark and SQL optimization at scale.

* Strong systems thinking and performance optimization skills.

Influence Without Authority

* Demonstrated ability to align diverse stakeholders and drive architectural adoption across teams.

* Clear, executive-level communication and…