Assistant Director-Engineering (Data Enablement)

Principal Financial Group is seeking an Assistant Director of Engineering to join their Retirement & Income Solutions business. In this role, you will lead data engineering teams and drive the development of data enablement capabilities to enhance customer outcomes and market insights.

Responsibilities:

• Drive priority decisions that deliver new data and AI capabilities while enabling high quality, trusted data across the full data lifecycle
• Partner with product, business, data & analytics, and technology stakeholders to prioritize work and ensure teams stay focused on the highest value outcomes
• Lead and support data engineers with diverse skill sets across cloud-based platforms (AWS, Snowflake, IDMC), on-premises‑ technologies (Informatica PowerCenter), and mainframe DB2 environments
• Collaborate with delivery managers to review performance metrics and foster a continuous improvement mindset
• Serve as a people leader by mentoring and developing teams of high-impact data engineers
• Work effectively with leaders and teams located both stateside and offshore in a globally distributed model
• Execute against defined strategies while also influencing broader technical and organizational direction based on insights from your teams
• Ensure robust data pipeline delivery, high-quality trusted data, and reliable deployments across multiple teams
• Support large, cross-team‑ initiatives requiring strong coordination, communication, and alignment
• Act as an advocate for the responsible adoption of AI tools to improve data engineering productivity and effectiveness

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree (preferably in computer science, engineering, technology, or a related field) or equivalent professional experience
• 8+ years of enterprise level technical experience demonstrating increasing responsibility and impact
• More than 2 years formally leading engineering teams of at least 15 team members
• Guiding engineering teams through complex technical and business challenges
• Designing and delivering resilient, scalable solutions in large environments
• Building alignment and consensus among diverse stakeholders
• Navigating enterprise-level partnerships and dependencies
• Strategic, forward-thinking mindset with a bias toward action
• Strength in operating in dynamic, evolving environments
• Strong communication and collaboration skills across technical and non-technical audiences
• Be comfortable with flexible call times with our global staffing model
• 4+ years of technology leadership experience managing and mentoring direct reports
• Financial services industry experience
• Strong use of data and metrics to identify issues, measure progress, and guide decisions
• Solution architecture experience partnering closely with business leaders
• Solid background in Agile practices and tools such as Jira
• Experience with AWS, Snowflake, IDMC, and DB2, along with strong data modeling skills and expertise in shaping data product roadmaps, semantic layers, and scalable data solutions for analytics and consumption