Principal Engineer I - Principal Data Platform Engineer

Charter is proud to have a network that provides service to millions of customers across the US. The Network Engineering team is responsible for the implementation of approved network architecture and designs. Under limited supervision, this Principal Engineer position leads the architecture, engineering, administration, and strategic evolution of our Hadoop-based big data platform. This role is responsible for defining the technical direction of the enterprise data ecosystem, ensuring platform scalability, reliability, security, and operational excellence. The ideal candidate combines deep hands-on expertise in  Hadoop administration with strong  architecture leadership , cross-functional collaboration, and the ability to mentor engineering teams.

How You’ll Make an Impact 

• Owns the architecture, design, and lifecycle management of enterprise Hadoop clusters and supporting data platform services.
• Leads administration of Hadoop ecosystem components such as  HDFS, YARN, Hive, HBase, Spark, Kafka, Oozie, ZooKeeper, Impala , and related tooling.
• Defines platform standards for availability, performance, capacity planning, disaster recovery, backup, monitoring, and security.
• Drives infrastructure optimization across storage, compute, workload management, and job scheduling.
• Establishes best practices for cluster provisioning, configuration management, patching, upgrades, and decommissioning.
• Partner with data engineering, analytics, security, and infrastructure teams to support data ingestion, processing, governance, and access patterns.
• Troubleshoot complex platform, performance, and production stability issues across distributed systems.
• Lead root cause analysis and implement preventive measures to improve resiliency and service quality.
• Evaluate and guide migration or coexistence strategies involving cloud data platforms and hybrid architectures.
• Mentor engineers and administrators, providing technical leadership across platform operations and engineering initiatives.
• Create and maintain platform documentation, operational runbooks, and architecture standards.
• Create and maintain data views, data exports and automated data processing.

Working Conditions 

• Office environment 

What You’ll Bring to Spectrum 

Required Qualifications 

Education 

• Master’s or bachelor's degree in Engineering or related field or related work experience 

Experience 

• 5+ years engineering work experience 
• 5+ years project management work experience 

Skills 

• Ability to read, write, speak and understand English  
• Basic knowledge of related industry specifications and standards IEEE, ANSI, Fiber (Multimode, Single mode, UTP, etc.), Bridging, Switching, Routing, Ethernet and Transport technologies and protocols  
• Basic knowledge in network design, network architecture, protocols and network topology  
• Basic knowledge in TCP/IP and the OSI Model  
• Basic knowledge in using ticketing and software tools to support the current operations 
• Basic knowledge of network devices and basic network appliances  
• Basic knowledge of network designing software, such as Visio  
• Ability to perform duties in a very fast-paced environment and ability to learn new technology quickly  
• Ability to use personal computer and software applications  

Preferred Qualifications 

Education 

• Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE)  
• Industry and vendor specific certifications and training preferred (Cisco, Juniper, Alcatel-Lucent, etc.)  

Skills 

• Minimum four (4) years of software development experience using Python / Typescript
• Experience with Django/Flask/FastAPI
• Experience with Shell scripting, TCP/IP and networking concepts, system security best practices and system monitoring
• Capable of managing systems in a large scale, high availability, multi-site environment
• Experience working in DevOps practices and tools
• Experience with Hadoop and other database technologies, like Postgresql/MySQL, Splunk
• Experience with container technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
• Other Industry and vendor specific certifications, training (Python, DevOps, Network Technologies)

  • Advanced knowledge of network automation platforms and techniques

  • Advanced knowledge of concurrent, parallel and asynchronous programming design and techniques

  • Advanced knowledge of restful api design, operation and interaction

  • Working knowledge of PEP8 programming practices

  • Ability to read, understand and effectively convey RFC and IEEE standards and concepts