At Alcon, we are driven by the meaningful work we do to help people see brilliantly. We innovate boldly, champion progress, and act with speed as the global leader in eye care. Here, you’ll be recognized for your commitment and contributions and see your career like never before. Together, we go above and beyond to make an impact on the lives of our patients and customers. Are you ready to join us?
We foster an inclusive culture and are looking for diverse, talented leaders to join Alcon. The Principal Data Engineer is a senior technical leader responsible for designing, building, and evolving scalable, reliable, and secure enterprise data platforms and data products.
This role provides hands-on technical leadership across data architecture, data pipelines, cloud platforms, data quality, governance, and engineering practices. The Principal Data Engineer partners closely with Data Science, BI/Analytics, product teams, business stakeholders, and technology teams to ensure trusted, well-engineered data is available for analytics, AI, machine learning, reporting, and operational use cases.
The role is intended to be a technical leadership position rather than a people-management position, with significant responsibility for architecture decisions, engineering standards, mentoring, and solving the organization's most complex data engineering challenges.
In this role, a typical day will include:
Technical Leadership & Architecture
- Serve as a technical leader for enterprise data engineering solutions.
- Design scalable data architectures, data pipelines, integration patterns, and reusable data services.
- Establish engineering standards for data ingestion, transformation, storage, orchestration, testing, monitoring, and deployment.
- Lead technical design reviews and guide teams toward scalable solutions rather than short-term fixes.
- Evaluate emerging data technologies and recommend practical adoption where they provide measurable value.
Data Pipeline Engineering
- Design and develop robust batch and streaming data pipelines across enterprise data sources.
- Build reusable frameworks that improve development speed, consistency, observability, and maintainability.
- Optimize data pipelines for performance, scalability, reliability, and cost.
- Establish monitoring and alerting to proactively identify pipeline and data-quality issues.
- Improve pipeline reliability, freshness, and data-quality outcomes, which are specifically identified as engineering measures in your current organization material.
AI & Analytics Enablement
- Partner with Data Scientists and analytics teams to create reliable, AI-ready data foundations.
- Develop data pipelines and curated datasets supporting machine learning, forecasting, optimization, Generative AI, and advanced analytics.
- Support production AI solutions through appropriate data architecture, lineage, quality controls, monitoring, and reusable data services.
- Work closely with ML/AI engineering teams to enable scalable model development and deployment.
What you will bring to Alcon:
- Bachelor’s Degree or Equivalent years of directly related experience (or high school +13 yrs; Assoc.+9 yrs; M.S.+2 yrs; PhD+0 yrs)
- The ability to fluently read, write, understand, and communicate in English
- 5 Years of Relevant Experience
Preferred Qualifications:
- Power BI
- Business intelligence
How You Can Thrive at Alcon:
- Lead alongside high‑performing teams in a culture that values collaboration, accountability, and continuous improvement.
- Grow your career through leadership development and meaningful enterprise impact.
- Join Alcon’s mission to provide outstanding, innovative products and solutions to improve sight, improve lives, and grow your career!
- Alcon provides robust benefits package including health, life, retirement, flexible time off, and much more!
See your impact at: alcon.com/careers
ATTENTION: Current Alcon Employee/Contingent Worker
If you are currently an active employee/contingent worker at Alcon, please click the appropriate link below to apply on the Internal Career site.
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ALCON IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER AND PARTICIPATES IN E-VERIFY
Alcon takes pride in maintaining an inclusive environment that values different perspectives and our policies are non-discriminatory in recruitment, hiring, training, promotion or other employment practices for reasons of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, sexual orientation, marital or veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status. Alcon is also committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to individuals with disabilities. If, because of a medical condition or disability, you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the application process, or in order to perform the essential functions of a position, please send an email to [email protected] and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information.
Skills Required
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent directly related experience; alternatives include high school plus 13 years, associate degree plus 9 years, master’s degree plus 2 years, or PhD with no additional experience
- Fluent ability to read, write, understand, and communicate in English
- 5 years of relevant experience
- Power BI
- Business intelligence experience
Alcon Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Alcon and has not been reviewed or approved by Alcon.
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Retirement Support — Retirement benefits are framed as unusually strong, pairing a 401(k) match with an additional employer-funded retirement plan contribution. Stock purchase access and performance bonuses are also positioned as meaningful components of total rewards.
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Healthcare Strength — Health coverage is described as comprehensive across medical, dental, vision, life, disability, and mental health support. Distinctive vision-related perks, including free contact lenses in some cases, reinforce the perceived strength of the health-and-wellness offering.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Time-off offerings are characterized as robust, including paid holidays, PTO/vacation, paid sick time, and parental leave. Flexible time off for certain exempt roles and reported year-end shutdown periods further strengthen perceived coverage.
Alcon Insights
What We Do
Alcon helps people see brilliantly. As the global leader in eye care with a heritage spanning more than seven decades, we offer the broadest portfolio of products to enhance sight and improve people’s lives. Our Surgical and Vision Care products touch the lives of more than 260 million people in over 140 countries each year living with conditions like cataracts, glaucoma, retinal diseases and refractive errors. Our more than 20,000 associates are enhancing the quality of life through innovative products, partnerships with eye care professionals and programs that advance access to quality eye care.
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