Lead IT Data Engineer

Tyson Foods is hiring a Lead IT Data Engineer (onsite) to lead enterprise data solutions for the Beef & Pork Analytics team, with a focus on governed cloud pipelines and production-ready analytics.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of data engineering solutions for Beef & Pork Analytics, including Fresh Meats data lake, hub, analytics, semantic, and reporting-ready data layers.
• Convert business requirements, report needs, KPIs, functional specifications, and validation criteria into scalable data models, pipelines, transformations, and analytics-ready datasets.
• Develop, enhance, and support data products that enable Fresh Meats reporting use cases.
• Build and orchestrate complex ETL/ELT pipelines using approved enterprise patterns, including automation, dependency management, monitoring, alerting, and production support.
• Support source-system integrations into Data@Tyson/GCP, including replication, freshness monitoring, reconciliation, and exception handling for DB2, SAP, USDA, and other internal/external sources.
• Design for reuse across analytics projects using shared dimensions, conformed business definitions, enterprise business terms, and scalable modeling practices.
• Implement and validate data security requirements, including role-based access, row-level security, column-level security, ARS roles, and data classification dependencies and DSS/security review requirements when applicable.
• Partner with Data Governance, Data Stewards, Product Owners, Data Modeling Coaches, business SMEs, and reporting teams to ensure assets are documented, classified, stewarded, and aligned to approved terminology.
• Support Collibra workflows by ensuring tables, fields, lineage, classifications, and business terms are identified, reviewed, and maintained as part of delivery.
• Lead data quality, reconciliation, and observability practices so issues are detected proactively and traced from source systems through GCP layers to reporting outputs.
• Participate in and lead architecture and data model reviews, GitLab merge request readiness, release planning, production promotion, and change approval activities.
• Provide operational support for Beef & Pork Analytics products, including incident triage, service requests, data lake freshness issues, access/security questions, pipeline failures, and production reporting impacts.
• Coordinate with business and IT stakeholders during issue resolution by communicating impact, status, root cause, remediation steps, and validation results clearly and timely.
• Mentor data engineers and analysts in SQL, GCP, dbt, orchestration, data modeling, testing, documentation, and enterprise governance expectations.
• Manage technical relationships with internal platform teams, vendors, and third-party partners to deliver needed tools, integrations, and platform capabilities.
• Perform other assigned duties aligned with organizational vision, mission, values, and scope of practice.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, Analytics, or related field, or equivalent combination of education and relevant experience.
• 5+ years of relevant, practical experience in data engineering, cloud data platforms, enterprise analytics, data warehousing, business intelligence, or related delivery.
• Strong SQL skills and experience building analytical datasets for enterprise reporting, dashboards, semantic models, and downstream analytics consumption.
• Hands-on experience with cloud data platforms, preferably GCP and BigQuery (or comparable cloud technologies).
• Experience designing and supporting multi-layer data architectures (lake, hub, curated, analytics, semantic, dimensional, star-schema, or medallion-style models).
• Experience with ETL/ELT development, orchestration, pipeline monitoring, job dependencies, failure handling, and production support.
• Experience working with source-system data, preferably including ERP, mainframe, DB2, SAP, and datasets tied to manufacturing, sales, finance, pricing, or commodity-related domains.
• Understanding of data governance, metadata, business terminology, lineage, stewardship workflows, data classification, and controlled promotion into production.
• Experience implementing or supporting data security controls, including role-based, row-level, and column-level access patterns.
• Experience with Git-based development, merge requests, code review, deployment discipline, testing evidence, and change approval documentation.
• Experience with Kimball data warehouse methodology in a medallion raw-cleansed-curated architecture.
• Ability to lead technical design discussions, identify risks, challenge assumptions, and recommend scalable, supportable solutions.

Technologies

• SQL, GCP, BigQuery, ETL, ELT, DB2, SAP, USDA
• Data@Tyson, Power BI, Cloud Storage
• Dataproc, Pub/Sub, Composer/Airflow, Dataflow
• dbt, Python, PySpark, Spark, Terraform, CI/CD
• AtScale, Fivetran, HVR, CDC, Collibra, GitLab

Benefits

• Paid time off
• 401(k) plans
• Affordable health, life, dental, vision, and prescription drug benefits

Preferred Certification(s)

• Google Cloud data engineering, analytics, data governance, Power BI, or other relevant IT certifications

Preferred Technical Skills

• Experience with GCP services such as BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Dataproc, Pub/Sub, Composer/Airflow, Dataflow, or related tools.
• Experience with dbt, Python, PySpark, Spark, Terraform, CI/CD, or other modern data engineering technologies.
• Experience with Power BI, AtScale, semantic layer design, Fabric capacity awareness, or enterprise reporting consumption patterns.
• Experience with Fivetran, HVR, CDC, data replication, freshness checks, or source-to-cloud ingestion monitoring.
• Experience supporting USDA and analytics tied to commodity pricing, sales realization, profitability, finance, supply chain, order/invoice, customer, product, or manufacturing.
• Experience with data quality frameworks, automated reconciliation routines, observability tooling, or audit-ready validation practices.
• Experience supporting AI, machine learning, automation, or advanced analytics use cases through trusted and well-modeled data assets.

Soft Skills

• Technical Leadership: Senior technical contributor who leads complex engineering work and coaches others toward durable, governed solutions.
• Business Partnership: Builds relationships with business SMEs, product managers, analysts, data stewards, and platform teams.
• Execution Ownership: Drives work from discovery and design through development, validation, production deployment, support, and continuous improvement.
• Communication: Explains data concepts, technical tradeoffs, risks, timelines, dependencies, and decisions to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Detail Orientation: Values accuracy, traceability, and documentation for business-critical reporting, validation, issue resolution, and audit-sensitive processes.
• Strategic Thinking: Aligns architecture and engineering choices to business outcomes, reuse, governance, security, performance, and long-term maintainability.
• Mentorship: Develops engineers and analysts through SQL quality, modeling standards, documentation, testing, and support readiness.
• Change Management: Helps teams adopt new data patterns, cloud practices, governance expectations, and proactive production support behaviors.

Additional Information

• Location: Springdale, AR (onsite)
• Work shift: 1ST SHIFT (United States of America)
• Relocation assistance eligible: No
• Hourly applicants only: Complete the task after submitting the application to provide additional information to be considered for employment.
• Unsolicited assistance: Tyson Foods and its subsidiaries do not accept unsolicited support from external recruitment vendors for open positions within the United States.
• Unsolicited resumes: Any resumes or candidate profiles submitted by recruitment vendors or headhunters without valid written request and search agreement approved by HR will be considered the property of Tyson Foods.
• No fees: No fees will be paid if the candidate is hired due to an unsolicited referral.