Principal Engineer - Customer Domain & Customer Central

Role: Principal Engineer - Customer Domain & Customer Central Location: Plano, TX - Hybrid Duration: Long-term Position Summary: We are seeking a highly motivated and experienced Principal Engineer with 12+ years of experience in customer data platforms, enterprise architecture, and engineering leadership. This role is ideal for a candidate with deep expertise in Customer 360, MDM, data governance, cloud modernization, and scalable platform design. The successful candidate will serve as the senior technical leader for the Customer domain, driving the technical strategy, architecture, and modernization of Customer Central and related customer data products while ensuring platform scalability, reliability, security, governance, and alignment with enterprise analytics, AI/ML, and customer data initiatives. Essential Functions: Technical leadership: Own the Customer domain technology roadmap, engineering standards, solution design guidance, and alignment with enterprise architecture, security, data, MDM, and governance strategies. Customer Central expertise: Serve as the primary SME for application architecture, data model, business rules, integrations, providers/consumers, customer mastering, matching, survivorship, and identity resolution. Architecture and design: Lead architecture reviews and define patterns for customer data integration, data quality, Customer 360, golden record management, real-time services, and analytics enablement. Engineering excellence: Coach engineers and technical leads, review critical designs/code/deployment approaches, and promote automation, DevOps, CI/CD, observability, reliability, and secure engineering practices. Data strategy: Partner with business and data leaders to define customer data products, improve data quality, expand capabilities, support Customer 360, and enable self-service analytics and AI/ML use cases. Production reliability: Provide technical escalation for incidents, root cause analysis, performance optimization, reliability improvements, disaster recovery planning, and technical risk mitigation. Innovation and modernization: Evaluate emerging technologies, recommend architecture improvements, reduce technical debt, and drive modernization of customer mastering, identity resolution, and customer analytics capabilities. Decision Authority Technical standards: Architecture decisions in partnership with Enterprise and Data Architects, design patterns, integration standards, and technical governance. Platform direction: Customer Central modernization roadmap, technical debt prioritization, scalability strategy, and technology adoption recommendations. Engineering excellence: Code quality expectations, reliability standards, security/compliance adherence, and operational readiness requirements. Key Deliverables Customer Domain Technical Roadmap and Customer Central Architecture Strategy Technical standards, solution design patterns, and architecture review outcomes Modernization recommendations, technical risk assessments, and technical debt remediation priorities Engineering best-practice frameworks and production stability improvement plans Success Measures Platform health: Improved availability, reliability, performance, scalability, and reduction in critical production incidents. Engineering excellence: Reduced technical debt, improved code quality, stronger deployment efficiency, and consistent engineering standards. Business value: Faster delivery of customer capabilities, improved customer data quality, stronger adoption of data products, and higher stakeholder satisfaction. Leadership impact: Growth of technical talent, architecture consistency, and successful delivery of strategic Customer domain initiatives. Requirements Minimum Qualifications Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related technical field. 12+ years of experience in software engineering, enterprise application development, data platforms, or solution architecture. 5+ years of experience leading technical strategy, architecture, and engineering teams for enterprise-scale customer data, MDM, or Customer 360 platforms. Strong expertise in Master Data Management (MDM), customer mastering, identity resolution, matching and survivorship processes. Experience designing and implementing scalable, secure, and highly available enterprise applications and data platforms. Strong understanding of data architecture, data integration, APIs, event-driven architectures, and cloud-based solutions. Experience with customer data governance, data quality management, metadata management, and compliance requirements. Proven experience driving modernization initiatives, reducing technical debt, and implementing best practices for software engineering and platform reliability. Hands-on experience with DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, automation, observability, monitoring, and production support. Strong knowledge of security, privacy, risk management, and enterprise architecture principles. Experience partnering with cross-functional stakeholders, including Product Management, Data Governance, Security, Architecture, Engineering, and business teams. Excellent communication, leadership, mentoring, and stakeholder management skills. Experience supporting analytics, reporting, AI/ML, or Customer 360 initiatives through high-quality customer data platforms Position Type/Expected Hours of Work: Contract Hybrid Standard business hours Limited travel expected