Senior Lead Data Engineer

External

Toyota · Plano, TX

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About the role

Collaborative. Respectful. A place to dream and do. These are just a few words that describe what life is like at Toyota. As one of the world's most admired brands, Toyota is growing and leading the future of mobility through innovative, high-quality solutions designed to enhance lives and delight those we serve. We're looking for talented team members who want to Dream. Do. Grow. with us. An important part of the Toyota family is Toyota Financial Services (TFS), the finance and insurance brand for Toyota and Lexus in North America. While TFS is a separate business entity, it is an essential part of this world-changing company- delivering on Toyota's vision to move people beyond what's possible. At TFS, you will help create best-in-class customer experience in an innovative, collaborative environment. To save time applying, Toyota does not offer sponsorship of job applicants for employment-based visas or any other work authorization for this position at this time. Who we're looking fo r At TFS, we're building next-generation products that redefine mobility for millions of customers worldwide. We're looking for a Sr Lead Data Enginee r - an individual contributor at the principal level - who brings deep expertise in data engineering, streaming architectures, and analytics platforms, combined with technical leadership to make data a reliable, scalable foundation for the entire engineering organization. This isn't a management role. It's for the engineer who thinks in pipelines and data contracts: the one who can design a Lakehouse architecture, build a real-time streaming platform, ensure data quality at scale, and make it all self-service for the teams that depend on it. You'll work at the intersection of backend engineering, ML/AI, and analytics - making sure the data that powers our products, models, and decisions is trustworthy, timely, and accessible. If you want to build the data backbone of a modern engineering org - not just move files around - this is the role. This position is based in Plano, TX. The selected candidate will be expected to reside within a commutable distance of this location.

Responsibilities

Serve as the technical authority for data architecture across the organization, making high-impact decisions on data lake design, streaming topologies, storage formats, partitioning strategies, and data modeling patterns

Design, build, and maintain production-grade data pipelines - batch and real-time - from ingestion and transformation to serving and consumption

Own the data platform: build and evolve the foundational infrastructure that engineering, ML/AI, and analytics teams depend on for reliable, governed, and performant data access

Partner closely with ML/AI engineers to ensure training data, feature pipelines, and model serving data are accurate, fresh, and efficiently delivered - you are the upstream enabler for every model in production

Collaborate with backend and full-stack engineers to design event-driven architectures, define data contracts, and ensure application data flows cleanly into the data platform

Lead technical design reviews, architecture discussions, and RFC processes for data initiatives - driving alignment across engineering teams

Identify and resolve systemic data issues: pipeline failures, data quality degradation, schema drift, latency in streaming systems, cost inefficiencies in storage and computing, and gaps in data observability

Define and champion data engineering best practices: data modeling, schema evolution, data contracts, testing strategies, lineage tracking, cataloging, and governance

Design and implement data quality frameworks - validation rules, anomaly detection, freshness checks, and alerting - so downstream consumers can trust the data without asking

Collaborate closely with Engineering Managers, Product, Data Science, and Analytics to shape data roadmaps and ensure the platform evolves with business needs

Mentor and grow engineers at all levels through code reviews, pairing, design feedback, and technical guidance on data engineering topics

Contribute to hiring by conducting technical interviews and helping define what great looks like for data engineering at TFS

Proactively communicate technical risks, tradeoffs, and recommendations to both engineering and non-technical stakeholders

What you bring

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or related field, or equivalent practical experience

7+ years of software or data engineering experience, including 3-5 years focused specifically on data platform and pipeline engineering at scale, with a track record of operating at a principal or staff engineer level

Deep expertise in designing and building data lake and Lakehouse architectures on AWS , including:

S3 as the foundation for data lake storage, with strong opinions on partitioning, file formats (Parquet, Avro, ORC), and lifecycle management

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