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 play a pivotal role in shaping the technical foundation of our data infrastructure while driving innovation and excellence within our global Platform GenAI team. Your expertise will guide critical design decisions, ensuring our data platforms are reliable, scalable, and high-performing. You will mentor and support data engineers, fostering their growth and championing best practices to elevate the team’s capabilities. Collaborating closely with cross-functional teams - including product managers, data scientists, engineers, and designers - you will help define requirements, prioritize features, and deliver impactful solutions that transform how we work using generative AI.

In this role, you will design, develop, and maintain scalable data pipelines and infrastructure, enabling top use cases for generative AI applications. You will work at the intersection of technology and product development, partnering with stakeholders to deliver cutting-edge data processing capabilities. Your responsibilities will include improving development processes, enhancing tooling, and advocating for best practices to boost efficiency and productivity. Additionally, you will play a key role in resolving production issues, implementing monitoring solutions, and contributing to the continuous improvement of testing frameworks and tools.

As part of McKinsey’s Tech Ecosystem function, you will join a distributed team spanning North America, Europe, and Latin America, dedicated to advancing the firm’s internal technology solutions. With a cloud-first approach, we are transforming data platforms and analytical applications to drive innovation and deliver impactful AI solutions. By staying at the forefront of industry trends, you will help integrate new tools and methodologies, ensuring our team remains a leader in data engineering and generative AI.

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

• 8+ 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.