SAP/ERP Transformation - Lead Data Engineer

Data-Science & Analytics Enterprise level technical leader who defines the vision, architecture, and operating model for data platforms and data products, enabling secure, scalable, and reliable data solutions that accelerate analytics, reporting, and machine learning across the business. This hands-on leader acts as a conduit between enterprise data engineering teams and the Transformation organization, remaining highly technical while building frameworks, guiding team direction, architecture, and best practices. *Our flexible/hybrid work schedule includes 3 in-person days at one of our core locations and 2 remote days. Our core office location for this role is Salisbury, NC. *Applicants must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a full-time basis. Duties and Responsibilities: Set the north star data architecture (batch/streaming, lakehouse, MDM, governance) and establish actionable standards, guardrails, and reference implementations. Establish product-oriented platform capabilities (self-service ingestion, transformation, orchestration, catalog/lineage, quality) and the internal tooling that enables scalable developer and analyst workflows. Define and drive automation standards, including CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows for data platforms and services. Embed security, privacy, and compliance by design, leveraging automation to enforce policies and produce audit-ready evidence. Orchestrate reliability and observability across pipelines and platforms (SLOs, cost/performance telemetry, automated remediation), including platform-wide monitoring, logging, and tracing practices (e.g., DataDog). Guide cloud service integration and container/orchestration strategy where applicable, ensuring cost-effective scale and predictable performance. Maintain and govern infrastructure as code practices (e.g., Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation) to standardize environments, reduce drift, and improve repeatability. Prioritize roadmaps and investments using measurable value, risk reduction, and customer (data consumer) outcomes; evaluate and adopt new technologies to improve platform capabilities. Collaborate with development teams to provide reusable infrastructure components, golden paths, and platform patterns that accelerate delivery. Mentor principal and senior engineers, grow a community of practice, and raise engineering quality. May be called upon to support critical escalations and must be available during urgent IT incidents as needed. Design and build reusable data engineering frameworks and standards used across multiple squads to improve consistency, scalability, and delivery quality. Develop, manage, and optimize scalable pipelines that move data from SAP and legacy platforms into the enterprise data lake and deliver trusted data for reporting, analytics, AI, application and business consumption. Harmonize and transform data from disparate legacy systems into SAP while maintaining appropriate data quality, lineage, governance, and reconciliation controls. Provide hands-on technical leadership for Microsoft Data Ecosystem, Databricks and SAP Business Data Cloud solutions, including architecture decisions, implementation guidance, proof-of-concepts, and performance optimization. Drive the Reporting & Analytics engineering strategy and design API-driven and event-streaming solutions that enable secure, reliable, and timely access to enterprise data products. Qualifications: Bachelor's degree or equivalent years of work experience. 12+ years in data/platform engineering with enterprise scope and measurable impact. Mastery of data architecture (streaming and batch), lake/lakehouse/warehouse patterns, governance, and security. Proven leadership of automation, CI/CD for data, and observability at scale. Executive level communication, influence, and stakeholder alignment. Deep expertise with Databricks and modern lakehouse architecture, including Spark-based processing, Delta Lake, orchestration, governance, performance optimization, and production operations. Demonstrated experience designing, building, testing, and operating scalable batch and real-time data pipelines using SQL and a modern programming language such as Python or Scala. Strong knowledge of REST APIs, event-driven architectures, and streaming technologies such as Kafka or comparable platforms. Strong background in reporting and analytics, including data modeling and delivery of trusted, analytics-ready datasets for enterprise consumption. Proven ability to communicate complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical audiences, manage stakeholders, influence across teams, and serve as a bridge among engineering, business, and transformation teams. Practical interest and experience in AI, Generative AI, and emerging technologies, supported by a demonstrated passion for continuous learning. Preferred Qualifications: Experience productizing internal data platforms and measuring adoption/value. Exposure to cost governance (FinOps) and multi cloud strategies. Hands-on experience with SAP Business Data Cloud, Databricks, SAP Datasphere, or integration of SAP data products with an enterprise Databricks environment. Experience supporting a large-scale SAP S/4HANA transformation and harmonizing data between legacy platforms, SAP, and enterprise analytical environments. Databricks Data Engineer Professional certification or a comparable advanced cloud, data engineering, SAP, or architecture certification. Experience with Delta Sharing, Unity Catalog, Lakeflow, Auto Loader, production-grade streaming workloads, and AI-ready or Generative AI data products. Experience partnering with system integrators and shaping reporting and analytics strategy across multiple business domains or squads. Salary Range NC: $160,000 - $240,000Actual compensation offered to a candidate may vary based on their unique qualifications and experience, internal equity, and market conditions. Final compensation decisions will be made in accordance with company policies and applicable laws. At Ahold Delhaize USA, we provide services to one of the largest portfolios of grocery companies in the nation, and we're actively seeking top talent.Our team shares a common motivation to drive change, take ownership and enable our brands to better care for their customers. We thrive on supporting great local grocery brands and their strategies.Our associates are the heartbeat of our organization. We are committed to offering a welcoming work environment where all associates can succeed and thrive. Guided by our values of courage, care, teamwork, integrity (and even a little humor), we are dedicated to being a great place to work.We believe in collaboration, curiosity, and continuous learning in all that we think, create and do. While building a culture where personal and professional growth are just as important as business growth, we invest in our people, empowering them to learn, grow and deliver at all levels of the business. Ahold Delhaize