McKinsey & Company

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.

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 Growth

You are someone who thrives in a high-performance environment, bringing a growth mindset and entrepreneurial spirit to tackle meaningful challenges that have a real impact.

In return for your drive, determination, and curiosity, we’ll provide the resources, mentorship, and opportunities to help you quickly broaden your expertise, grow into a well-rounded professional, and contribute to work that truly makes a difference.

When you join us, you will have:

• Continuous learning: Our learning and apprenticeship culture, backed by structured programs, is all about helping you grow while creating an environment where feedback is clear, actionable, and focused on your development. The real magic happens when you take the input from others to heart and embrace the fast-paced learning experience, owning your journey.
• A voice that matters: From day one, we value your ideas and contributions. You’ll make a tangible impact by offering innovative ideas and practical solutions. We not only encourage diverse perspectives, but they are critical in driving us toward the best possible outcomes.
• Global community: With colleagues across 65+ countries and over 100 different nationalities, our firm’s diversity fuels creativity and helps us come up with the best solutions. Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from exceptional colleagues with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
• Exceptional benefits: In addition to a competitive salary (based on your location, experience, and skills), we offer a comprehensive benefits package, including medical, dental, mental health, and vision coverage for you, your spouse/partner, and children.

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.