Principal Platform Engineer

Job Description
The Moderna Data Platform team is seeking an experienced Principal Platform Engineer/Tech Lead to drive the design, development, and strategic evolution of our cloud-native enterprise data platform. In this role, you'll lead the technical architecture of data solutions and actively collaborate with platform engineering to enable self-service capabilities for stakeholders across 16+ business domains.
You'll serve as a technical leader and systems thinker-ensuring the platform scales with our growth, remains aligned with enterprise standards, and empowers teams to independently access, integrate, and utilize data securely and efficiently.
• The Role Architect and lead implementation of Data platform self-service capabilities across ingestion, processing, storage, and consumption layers
Drive adoption of modern data stack technologies and best practices (e.g., data lakehouse architecture).
Partner with product managers, data scientists, analysts, and engineering teams to translate business needs into scalable technical solutions.
Mentor data engineers and provide architectural oversight during design, implementation, and deployment phases.
Define and enforce standards for access control, quality, cataloging, and observability across domains.
Provide hands-on leadership and technical mentorship to Software engineers, data engineers and platform developers.
Collaborate with enterprise architecture, security, and infrastructure teams to align with broader org standards and policies.
Evaluate emerging tools and technologies in the data ecosystem and recommend solutions to improve scalability, performance, and cost-efficiency.
Own architecture documentation and promote reuse of patterns and capabilities across Data Platform.
Ensure platform compliance with data privacy and security requirements (e.g., GxP).


Break into Basic Qualifications and Preferred Qualifications


Basic Qualifications:
Over 8 years of experience in software engineering, with a strong focus on designing and implementing scalable data architectures. Proven expertise in architecting end-to-end data solutions on AWS
Background in architecting and leading self-service data platform capabilities
Deep understanding of data lakehouse architecture
Hands-on experience with data services such as AWS Glue, Amazon Redshift, as well as proficiency in Python, SQL, and dbt, spark and apache iceberg
Hands-on experience with CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and modern DevOps practices
Experience leading teams or mentoring junior engineers.
Excellent communication and leadership skills with the ability to influence both technical and non-technical stakeholders


Preferred Qualifications:
Experience with data governance frameworks, lineage, cataloging, and metadata management
Familiarity with data privacy, compliance, and security best practices.
Prior experience working in a highly collaborative environment with product, data science, and analytics teams.