The Foundation

We are the largest nonprofit fighting poverty, disease, and inequity around the world. Founded on a simple premise: people everywhere, regardless of identity or circumstances, should have the chance to live healthy, productive lives. We believe our employees should reflect the rich diversity of the global populations we aim to serve. We provide an exceptional benefits package to employees and their families which include comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage with no premiums, generous paid time off, paid family leave, foundation-paid retirement contribution, regional holidays, and opportunities to engage in several employee communities. As a workplace, were committed to creating an environment for you to thrive both personally and professionally.

The Team

This position is a limited-term position for 36 months. Relocation will not be provided.

Your Role

As a Lead Data Engineer, you are an experienced technical leader for the foundations Modern Data Platform. You are responsible for developing, delivering, and improving scalable, secure, and high-performing data solutions. These solutions enable enterprise reporting, analytics, search, AI, and data-driven decision-making across the foundation and its affiliates. You operate with a high degree of independence and accountability, serving as both a hands-on technical leader and a practice lead who shapes engineering standards, mentors engineers, and strengthens overall data platform capability. You translate complex organizational and technical challenges into practical data engineering strategies and scalable platform solutions. You are accountable not just for delivering pipelines or datasets, but for ensuring the health, reliability, performance, governance, and long-term sustainability of the enterprise data ecosystem.

What Youll Do

Technology & Architecture Leadership

Define and evolve the data engineering technology roadmaps aligned to business strategies, enterprise architecture, information security standards.

Provide architectural leadership on complex, cross-team data initiatives, ensuring solutions are scalable, secure, resilient, and maintainable.

Lead data platform and vendor evaluations, guiding build vs. buy decisions and ensuring consistency with enterprise technical direction.

Develop and promote data engineering standards for lakehouse architecture, ELT/ETL frameworks, data modeling, CI/CD, observability, and governance.

Anticipate technology impacts across applications, data, integrations, and infrastructureand guide teams through informed trade-off decisions including assessing new technology.

Solution Delivery & Engineering Excellence

Day-to-day hands-on execution and implementation of solutions – using modern data platforms, initiatives, processes and practices.

Be responsible for technical direction for large or multi-team delivery efforts, ensuring application of modern data engineering and DevSecOps practices.

Conduct architectural and technical reviews of solution designs, code, and delivery approaches to raise quality and consistency.

Champion automation, observability, and operational excellence to ensure platforms remain reliable, performant, and cost effective.

Pilot emerging technologies and guide their adoption into stable enterprise capabilities when appropriate.

Drive continuous improvement of engineering practices, tooling, automation and operational processes.

Service & Portfolio Strategy

Partner with service managers and product owners to shape data service strategies, roadmaps and investment priorities.

Translate complex system challenges into actionable plans aimed to improve sustainability, lifecycle health, and user experience.

Provide senior-level support to annual planning, including resource needs, modernization opportunities, risks, and capacity considerations.

Represent technology perspectives in strategic and portfolio discussions, ensuring alignment between business direction and technical capability.

Leadership, Influence & Collaboration

Serve as a lead for the practice and senior mentor, coach data engineers and contingent staff, as well as managing service partners

Build strong, collaborative relationships across IT, Business Operations, and programmatic teams.

Lead cross-functional data architecture and design discussions, guiding teams through ambiguity with clarity, sound judgment, and tactical planning.

Communicate effectively across technical and non-technical audiences, including senior leadership, converting complex concepts into clear implications and recommendations.

Representing IT in foundation working groups, governance forums, and cross-team initiatives, coordinating efforts to reflect broader strategies and priorities.

Lead core initiatives partnering across Program Strategy Teams, Operations and IT.

Your Experience

Bachelors degree or equivalent experience typically requires an advanced degree or equivalent experience and a minimum of 10+ years of relevant data engineering experience in enterprise environments.

Mastery-level knowledge of the data engineering field and modern data platform technology delivery, with deep experience in one or more key domains such as lakehouse architecture, distributed data processing, cloud data warehousing, data transformation frameworks, or data governance.

Demonstrated ability to build and complete implementation plans for complex, enterprise-scale data platforms and pipelines. These platforms support analytics, reporting, AI/ML, and operational decision-making. They also impact on the achievement of the foundations priorities.

Proven experience developing and implementing standards, processes, and operational plans that improve stability, resilience, security, and performance of critical data platforms.

Deep expertise with cloud-based data platforms – Azure Data services, Databricks, Snowflake and DBT cloud.

Strong foundation in enterprise data architecture fields and the development of secure, scalable, aligned technology solutions.

Advanced experience with CI/CD pipelines for data workloads, infrastructure as code, cloud-native operational models, and modern version control strategies.

Strong proficiency in programming using data processing tools like Azure Data Factory, Fivetran, Databricks notebook, DBT cloud, ETL/ELT frameworks, as well as programming languages such as Python, SQL, Spark (PySpark/Scala) and scripting languages common to cloud data environments.

Demonstrated success leading large-scale and complex data modernization initiatives, including migration from legacy data warehouses to modern cloud-based data platforms.

Experience managing and reviewing vendors or offshore engineering work to ensure alignment with enterprise data standards, architecture principles and long-term sustainability.

Excellent communication and influencing skills, with the ability to clearly and succinctly translate complex data architecture concepts into actionable recommendations for senior leadership, technical teams, and non-technical partners across multiple functions.

Demonstrated ability to enable AI through data, with a strong understanding of AI use cases and the data architecture, quality, governance, lineage, and scalability requirements necessary to successfully support AI initiatives.

Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities, demonstrating a dedication to operational excellence, continuous learning, and improving data engineering practices.

May mentor, review, and delegate work to more junior engineers, building capability and maturity across the data engineering group.

Must have unrestricted work authorization in the country where this position is located. The Foundation does not provide immigration-related sponsorship for this role. This includes direct company sponsorship and any work authorization requiring a written submission or other immigration support from the company (eg: H-1B, O-1, L-1, E, OPT, STEM-OPT, CPT, TN, J-1, etc.).

The salary range for this role is $190,100.00 to $294,700.00 USD. We recognize high-wage market differences in Seattle and Washington D.C., where our offices are located. The range for this role in these locations is $209,100.00 to $324,100.00 USD. As a mission-driven organization, we strive to balance competitive pay with our mission. New hires salaries are typically between the range minimum and the salary range midpoint. Actual placement in the range will depend on a candidates job-related skills, experience, and expertise, as evaluated during the interview process.

Hiring Requirements

As part of our standard hiring process for new employees, employment will be contingent upon successful completion of a background check.

Candidate Accommodations

Were committed to providing an inclusive and accessible hiring experience for all candidates. If you have a disability or medical condition and need an accommodation at any stage of the application or interview processsuch as an ASL interpreter, alternative interview format, or physical accessibility supportwere happy to help. Please contact HR@gatesfoundation.org with the position number and a brief description of your accommodation needs. Requests will be handled confidentially.

Inclusion Statement

We are dedicated to the belief that all lives have equal value. We strive for a global and cultural workplace that supports ever greater diversity, equity, and inclusion of voices, ideas, and approaches and we support this diversity through all our employment practices.

All applicants and employees who are drawn to serve our mission will enjoy equality of opportunity and fair treatment without regard to race, color, age, religion, pregnancy, sex, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, and prior protected activity.