Principal Analytics Engineer

📋 Description

• • As a Principal Analytics Engineer at Workday, Inc., you will be instrumental in shaping the future of enterprise data and analytics. You will join a newly launched Enterprise Data and Analytics (ED&A) Team tasked with transforming and optimizing how Workday creates and shares trusted data, driving actionable insights and fostering data-led innovation across the entire organization.
• • This role is at the forefront of building scalable data products, ensuring robust data quality and governance through version control, and establishing best practices for the organization. You will operate at the critical intersection of Product, Engineering, and Business Operations, owning the crucial transformation layer of our modern data stack, which includes technologies like Snowflake and dbt.
• • Your responsibilities extend beyond execution; you will focus on architectural governance, serving as the dbt expert to define and enforce data product development best practices that prioritize scalability and cost-efficiency. This is a leadership position where you will mentor and coach junior engineers, fostering a culture of engineering rigor and elevating overall team performance.
• • You will navigate complex organizational dynamics inherent in cross-functional projects, acting as the key technical liaison to build consensus and drive the adoption of unified enterprise metrics. Your ultimate goal will be to define the strategy for foundational data projects, ensuring all business teams have access to optimized, efficient, and trusted data products.
• • Architect, design, and lead the development of end-to-end data pipelines and the transformation layer, ensuring they are performant, reliable, and scalable to meet the demands of a growing enterprise.
• • Serve as the subject matter expert for dbt, defining and championing data modeling standards and best practices across the organization. You will manage the full lifecycle of complex dimensional models and metrics, from initial prototyping through to production deployment.
• • Collaborate closely with Product Owners, Data Analysts, and business leaders across Sales, Marketing, and Finance to scope and deliver high-impact analytics initiatives. This involves ensuring that analytics requirements are clearly understood and effectively translated into technical solutions.
• • Function as a highly independent individual contributor, adept at solving complex and ambiguous problems. You will deliver high-quality, architecturally sound solutions with minimal oversight, taking significant ownership over critical data domains.
• • Mentor, guide, and coach junior and mid-level engineers, empowering them to deliver complex and next-generation features. You will actively instill a culture of software engineering rigor, code quality, best practices, standards, and technical excellence within the team.
• • Master the dynamics of high-stakes projects, expertly navigating stakeholder and internal complexities to align business needs with technical feasibility. You will be responsible for securing consensus on enterprise-wide metric definitions.
• • Design and build robust database architectures capable of handling massive and complex data volumes. This includes skillfully balancing computational load, query latency, and data warehouse cost efficiency, while integrating strong data quality audits and testing frameworks at scale to ensure resilience.
• • Proactively identify technical debt, improve tooling, automate complex workflows, and streamline processes for transformation and deployment to boost overall data team productivity.
• • Apply a customer-centric, product-oriented mindset, collaborating with external and internal stakeholders to resolve ambiguities and ensure that delivered data features are impactful, reliable, and directly align with business outcomes.
• • Build and maintain user-friendly documentation for data models, data processes, workflows, and systems to promote transparency and facilitate knowledge sharing across the organization.
• • Contribute to the strategic vision for data product development, ensuring alignment with Workday's broader business objectives and AI initiatives.
• • Drive the adoption of new technologies and methodologies within the analytics engineering space, staying abreast of industry trends and best practices.
• • Champion data governance principles and ensure compliance with relevant policies and standards.
• • Foster a collaborative and inclusive team environment, encouraging knowledge sharing and continuous learning.
• • Analyze and optimize existing data models and pipelines for performance, cost, and maintainability.
• • Develop and implement strategies for data quality monitoring and issue resolution.
• • Translate complex business requirements into well-defined technical specifications and data models.
• • Actively participate in code reviews, providing constructive feedback to peers and junior engineers.
• • Contribute to the development and maintenance of CI/CD pipelines for data transformations.
• • Ensure data security and privacy are maintained throughout the data lifecycle.
• • Support the broader ED&A team in achieving its strategic goals through effective data product delivery.