Principal Data Engineer I - Platform generative AI
McKinsey & Company
Software Engineering, Data Science
Lisbon, Portugal · Prague, Czechia · San Jose, CA, USA · São Paulo, SP, Brazil
Posted on Apr 28, 2025
Principal Data Engineer I - Platform generative AI
Job ID: 97330
Do you want to work on complex and pressing challenges—the kind that bring together curious, ambitious, and determined leaders who strive to become better every day? If this sounds like you, you’ve come to the right place.
Your Impact
As a Principal Data Engineer, you will be responsible for making critical technical design decisions that shape our data infrastructure. You will mentor and apprentice data engineers, fostering their growth and ensuring they adhere to best practices.
Your role includes influencing the data engineering team structure to optimize delivery and maximize impact. You will also be accountable for the quality of deliverables, ensuring that all code meets high standards of reliability, scalability, and performance. Your leadership and expertise will drive the team to achieve excellence in all aspects of data engineering.
You’ll be a member of a global team working on generative AI (gen AI) initiative. McKinsey’s Tech Ecosystem function is responsible for developing and delivering all technology solutions for the firm’s internal use. We are taking a cloud-first approach to transform our data platforms and analytical applications across the firm.
As part of the team, you will sit at the technical side and work closely with product professionals to deliver data processing capabilities enabling top use cases to transform how we work using gen AI. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams, including product managers, data scientists, engineers, data engineers, designers, and firm stakeholders, to define product requirements, prioritize features, and drive a successful delivery.
You will play a key role in our Data Engineering team, designing, developing, and maintaining our data pipelines & infrastructure. You will collaborate with team members to implement scalable data solutions and participate in meetings, code reviews, and problem-solving sessions.
Your responsibilities will include improving tooling and development processes to enhance efficiency and productivity, developing internal tools to streamline workflows, and advocating for best practices in data engineering. You will also mentor junior engineers to ensure high-quality code.
In the event of production incidents, you will work with the operations team to diagnose and resolve issues quickly, developing monitoring solutions to prevent future problems. Maintaining high-quality deliverables is essential, and you will contribute to enhancing testing frameworks and tools.
Staying current with industry trends, you will integrate new tools and methodologies into our processes and participate in post-mortem analyses to identify and implement improvements. Your expertise will help ensure our team delivers high-quality data solutions efficiently.
Your Growth
You’ll work with the generative AI team focused on AI platforms or products. Our team is distributed across multiple locations, including offices in North America, Europe, and Latin America.
The generative AI team is dedicated to advancing the capabilities and applications of data retrieval and generative AI within our firm, driving innovation, and delivering impactful AI solutions.
Your qualifications and skills
- 5+ years of professional experience as a data engineer, with a strong focus on cloud- based data engineering using AWS services
- Expertise with Python development
- Practicing high coding standards with clean code, modularity, error handling, testing automation and more
- Strong experience with relational databases
- Hands-on experience with Docker
- Solid and demonstrable background in data pipeline performance and diagnostics
- Interest in generative AI and other ML topics
- Kedro framework experience as a plus
- Familiarity with agile principles and product development
- Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to analyze and resolve complex data engineering challenges
- Very driven, super strong on execution and output orientation, likes to get job done attitude and ability to figure things out independently
- Holds his/her ground, opinionated, not afraid to speak up at any level
- Ability to work in complex and very fast paced environment
- Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively in a cross-functional team environment
Please review the additional requirements regarding essential job functions of McKinsey colleagues.
FOR U.S. APPLICANTS: McKinsey & Company is an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, national origin, disability, protected Veteran status, age, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.
FOR NON-U.S. APPLICANTS: McKinsey & Company is an Equal Opportunity employer. For additional details regarding our global EEO policy and diversity initiatives, please visit our McKinsey Careers and Diversity & Inclusion sites.
FOR BRAZILIAN APPLICANTS: Applicants for job positions in any office in Brazil have flexibility regarding qualifications and McKinsey & Company will not require previous experience of more than 6 months. If the job description indicates preferred prior work experience of more than 6 months, applicants for such job position in the Brazilian offices must interpret the preferred qualification described as limited up to 6 months maximum.
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Job Skill Group - N/A
Job Skill Code - DEE - Principal Data Engineer I
Function - Technology
Industry - High Tech
Post to LinkedIn - Yes
Posted to LinkedIn Date - Thu Apr 24 00:00:00 GMT 2025
LinkedIn Posting City - Prague
LinkedIn Posting State/Province -
LinkedIn Posting Country - Czech Republic
LinkedIn Job Title - Principal Data Engineer I - Platform generative AI
LinkedIn Function - Information Technology
LinkedIn Industry - Computer Software;Information Technology and Services;Management Consulting
LinkedIn Seniority Level - Executive
Job Skill Code - DEE - Principal Data Engineer I
Function - Technology
Industry - High Tech
Post to LinkedIn - Yes
Posted to LinkedIn Date - Thu Apr 24 00:00:00 GMT 2025
LinkedIn Posting City - Prague
LinkedIn Posting State/Province -
LinkedIn Posting Country - Czech Republic
LinkedIn Job Title - Principal Data Engineer I - Platform generative AI
LinkedIn Function - Information Technology
LinkedIn Industry - Computer Software;Information Technology and Services;Management Consulting
LinkedIn Seniority Level - Executive