Principal Consultant, Data - NY or DC Metro

Principal Consultant, Data - NY or DC Metro

New York, United States | Posted on 04/09/2026

Work Style/ Location:Hybrid, Office, Washington DC Metro or New York, NY

Type: Full-Time

Sector: Data, AI& Analytics

Position Overview

BizFirst is supporting our client in identifying a Principal Consultant to lead data and AI engagements across a broad mix of industries and platforms. This is a senior, hands‑on role for someone with 10+ years of experience who wants to own customer relationships, lead multi‑stream delivery, and help shape a growing practice.

Principal Consultants run their engagements. You’ll have direct access to client executives and data leadership, set technical direction for delivery teams, and decide how the work gets done. A growing portion of the practice sits at the intersection of data and generative AI, helping customers build agentic workflows, semantic layers, and LLM‑ready data foundations.

Our client is a fast‑growing global data and AI consultancy with operations across three continents and 140+ consultants serving 70+ enterprise clients. They’ve built a consultant‑first culture with a proprietary learning academy, paid certifications, and deep partnerships with platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, and Google Cloud. The U.S. office combines the credibility of an established global brand with the energy of a New York startup.

Your Career, Accelerated

This is a senior role with real ownership. You’ll run engagements end‑to‑end, set the technical direction, and make decisions close to the ground where they can make a difference. You’ll work across a wide range of verticals and platforms, partner with alliance teams at Snowflake, Databricks, and Google Cloud to shape new work, and help build the playbooks, reference architectures, and learning academy modules that the next generation of consultants will learn from.

What You'll Do

• Own the customer relationship. Run multi‑stream programs with direct access to client executives and data leadership, and make the calls that move the work forward.
• Grow the account. Partner with business development, sales engineering, and Snowflake, Databricks, and Google Cloud alliance teams to scope new work, shape proposals, and expand existing engagements.
• Deliver hands‑on. Ship production‑grade data platforms, pipelines, and AI workflows alongside consultants and senior consultants. Delivery at this level is hands‑on; nothing gets handed off and forgotten.
• Lead the team. Set technical direction for delivery teams of three to six consultants, break work into clear streams, unblock your engineers, review their code and designs, and raise the bar through your own contributions.
• Shape the practice. Contribute to playbooks, reference architectures, and delivery patterns; mentor Senior Consultants moving toward Principal; and author the learning academy modules you wish had existed earlier in your career.
• Languages: SQL (lots of it), Python , Spark.
• Data Platforms: Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Microsoft Fabric ; breadth across more than one is a plus.
• Transformation & Orchestration: dbt , Airflow, Dagster, Prefect .
• Ingestion & Streaming: Fivetran, Airbyte, dlt, Kafka, Kinesis , or homegrown pipelines.
• Governance & Catalog: Unity Catalog, Snowflake Horizon, Microsoft Purview .
• GenAI & ML: Snowflake Cortex, Databricks Mosaic, Vertex AI ; RAG, semantic search, agentic workflows, and LLM‑in‑the‑loop systems.
• BI & Viz: Power BI, Tableau, Looker .

What We're Looking For

This is a senior role, so we’re looking for someone with deep technical chops, a track record leading multi‑stream delivery, and the judgment to run customer relationships at the executive level. Depth in many of these areas is what we’re after:

• Located in Washington DC Metro or New York, NY.
• 10+ years in data engineering, analytics engineering, or data platform consulting.
• Track record leading multi‑stream delivery on complex data and analytics programs.
• Strong SQL fundamentals and data modeling depth (Kimball, Inmon, Data Vault, whatever your flavor), plus solid grounding in data engineering principles like data timelines, cleaning, and pipeline engineering.
• Deep hands‑on experience with modern cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, or Microsoft Fabric) and production ELT/streaming environments.
• Working knowledge of data lakes, including when to use them and how to play to their strengths.
• Hands‑on experience with dbt and modern orchestrators like Airflow, Dagster, or Prefect.
• Experience designing for lineage, access control, and cost efficiency from day one using tools like Unity Catalog, Snowflake Horizon, or Microsoft Purview.
• Comfort working directly with client executives and data leadership, shaping proposals, and partnering with sales engineering and platform alliance teams.
• Familiarity with classical ML and modern generative AI patterns including RAG, semantic search, agentic workflows, and LLM‑in‑the‑loop systems.
• Experience working with BI and data viz tools such as Power BI, Tableau, or Looker.
• A hands‑on delivery mindset; this role codes, reviews designs, and unblocks the team, it doesn’t hand things off and hope for the best.
• A natural problem solver who stays curious, adapts quickly, and wants to build a better consultancy based on empowerment, autonomy, and doing right by the customer.

These aren't requirements, but if any of these describe you, we'd love to hear about it:

• Certifications: Snowflake SnowPro, Databricks Data Engineer Professional, Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer, Microsoft Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate, and the like.
• Hands‑on experience building agentic workflows, semantic layers, or LLM‑ready data foundations in production.
• Industry depth in financial services, media and ad‑tech, gaming, freight and logistics, trading, or the public sector.

Our client offers stock standard benefits that everybody wants, plus a few extras:

• Medical, Dental, and Vision plans picked for both young single professionals and those with families to support.
• 401(k) match, dollar‑for‑dollar, up to 4% of your salary.
• Flexible paid time off designed for adults, take time as you need it (and you do need at least two weeks off, preferably contiguous, per year).
• Top‑of‑the‑line hardware, optimized for horsepower or mobility (we’re all on Macs).
• Proprietary learning academy with 100+ custom modules. At Principal level you’ll help shape the curriculum, authoring modules and mentoring peers through the topics you know best.
• Certification stipend for the platforms you deliver on.

About BizFirst

BizFirst is a recruiting firm built for companies that got tired of being account #47. We place talent across AI and data, GovCon, finance and operations, and telecom infrastructure. Every search is led by a senior Delivery Lead managing just 3 to 4 clients total. The result: candidates in days, a single point of contact from kickoff to placement, and a 94% retention rate past 90 days.

BizFirst LLC is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity, religion, sex, national origin, age, veteran disability or genetic information or any other reason prohibited by law in employment.