Principal Data Engineer (Delivery Engineering - DTC)

Benefits

Additional Information

Although we're an apparel and footwear-focused company, technology is central to everything we do . Columbia Sportswear's Digital Technology (CDT) group enables an IT infrastructure across four global brands, a global supply chain, and 500+ geographically dispersed stores . These teams support in-store, mobile, and data platforms to enhance customer interface and service in an ever-evolving industry. The Principal Data Engineer - BI is a senior technical leader within Columbia Sportswear's Global Capability Center (GCC) and Data & Analytics organization. This role is accountable for the architecture, governance, and long-term evolution of enterprise Power BI semantic models that power trusted analytics across Commercial, Supply Chain, and enterprise business domains. T he Principal Data Engineer - BI operates at an enterprise scale-defining modeling standards, performance patterns, and best practices that are adopted across teams. This role serves as the technical authority for BI semantic modeling, ensuring that Power BI models are scalable, performant, intuitive, and aligned with upstream data engineering and downstream analytics needs. HOW YOU'LL MAKE A DIFFERENCE Power BI Semantic Modeling (Primary Focus) Own the enterprise strategy and technical vision for BI semantic models, supporting Commercial, Supply Chain, and corporate analytics use cases. Design and govern shared, reusable, and conformed semantic model layers that enable consistent analytics across domains and business functions. Establish and enforce enterprise semantic modeling standards, encompassing dimensional modeling, DAX measures and calculation patterns, performance tuning and troubleshooting, and consistent design, naming, documentation, and reusability practices to ensure accurate , scalable, high ‑ performance self ‑ service analytics. Lead design reviews for high ‑ impact semantic models, influencing BI architecture decisions and ensuring alignment with enterprise data and analytics strategy. Analytics Enablement & Collaboration Define and maintain semantic model governance frameworks, including naming standards, metric ownership, certification, and lifecycle management Partner with Analytics Engineering and BI teams to ensure models are usable, discoverable, and trusted by analysts and business users Guide Power BI report developers on optimal model consumption patterns, performance considerations, and advanced capabilities Champion enterprise metric consistency and help resolve cross-domain data definition misalignment Proactively identify and mitigate systemic data quality or modeling risks across semantic, warehouse, and lake layers D ata Engineering & Platform Leadership Provide technical leadership across the end-to-end analytics data stack, from ingestion through curated datasets and semantic models Partner with Data Architects to ensure Power BI models align with Azure Databricks, Delta Lake, and enterprise Data Lake design patterns Influence ELT/ETL architecture decisions to optimize datasets for BI performance and usability Lead the design of curated analytical datasets and star schemas that serve multiple downstream use cases Evaluate new Power BI and Azure analytics capabilities and drive their responsible adoption Technical Leadership & Ways of Working Act as a technical mentor and coach to Senior and Mid-level Data Engineers, raising the overall bar for BI engineering Lead by influence rather than authority, driving alignment across distributed teams Contribute to Agile planning at a program or portfolio level, shaping technical roadmaps and sequencing Establish patterns that reduce long-term maintenance cost and improve platform scalability Represent BI engineering in cross-functional forums and architectural discussions Delivery & Ways of Working Influence Agile delivery planning, processes, including backlog refinement, estimation, sprint execution, and retrospectives Proactively identify data issues, technical risks, and improvement opportunities, escalating appropriately A strategic, collaborative leader who anticipates scaling challenges and raises capability across teams YOU ARE A recognized expert in BI semantic modeling and analytics data design A systems thinker who optimizes for enterprise scale, consistency, and longevity Comfortable making high-impact technical decisions amid ambiguity A technical leader who amplifies the effectiveness of others YOU HAVE Required Qualifications Bachelor's degree in Computer Science , Information Systems, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience Strong proficiency in SQL for analytical workloads, including query optimization and data validation Hands on experience building and supporting Power BI semantic models, including: Expert-level experience designing enterprise-scale Power BI semantic models ( Star schemas and dimensional models ) Deep mastery of: Dimensional modeling and star schemas Complex DAX pat