Senior Data Engineer

This is a Full Time Job

Sony Pictures Entertainment is seeking an experienced data engineer to join the Insights, Strategy and Analytics organization. The ISA team focuses on enhancing analytical capabilities and infrastructure for internal stakeholders across television production, distribution, and marketing.

The Senior Data Engineer conceptualizes, designs and builds reliable, performant ELT data pipelines that deliver business-ready data to advanced data analytics tools, including AI and machine learning applications, that drive innovation within the SPT business. This role will lead data and analytics engineering workstreams on fast-paced business-facing projects, working closely with non-technical stakeholders, product managers, data scientists, data visualization engineers and strategic analysts to enable ISA to deliver increasingly sophisticated and impactful analytical tools.

Key Responsibilities:
• Data Engineering: Oversee the ingestion of new sources into SPE's Snowflake data platform, working closely with central IT and cloud operations teams to define ingest requirements, cleaning requirements, and validate that pipelines meet business needs.
• Analytics Engineering: Translate complex business use cases into the design of robust data models using dbt and SQL. Establish tools and processes to ensure data quality and accuracy.
• Data Governance: Define and enforce data governance, compliance, and reliability standards at scale. Implement frameworks for data validation, lineage, and SLA management.
• Project Delivery: Contribute to fast-paced project teams working to build new ISA tools. Source and harmonize data from disparate systems to create consumption-ready data used by data scientists and data visualization leads, with ample collaboration across disciplines.
• Innovative Analysis & Insights: Enable advanced analytics by delivering high-quality, well-modeled datasets and guiding analytical approaches. Support emerging use cases including AI/ML and advanced forecasting.
• Stakeholder Communication: Influence and communicate data strategy, priorities, and outcomes to cross-functional stakeholders, including leaders. Drive alignment and champion adoption of data initiatives across stakeholders.
• Team Mindset: Contribute to a high-performance data team, advocating for rigorous standards and modernization. Collaborate openly with peers to create a team culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.

Qualifications:

Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Business Analytics, or related fields; advanced degrees are a plus.

Experience: 8+ years in data engineering in a production environment, preferably in media and entertainment or related industries.

Technical Acumen: Proficiency in data engineering, analytics tools, and methodologies.
• Expert-level SQL & Python skills. Experience building transformation pipelines in dbt is strongly preferred.
• Hands-on experience with modern orchestration tools like Airflow.
• Conceptual expertise in data modeling and system architecture design within a modern data stack.
• Familiarity with CI/CD workflows, version control, and automated testing frameworks to meet data quality standards.

AI Expertise:
• Broad knowledge of Generative AI, LLMs, agentic AI paradigms, model lifecycle landscape for modernizing legacy data pipelines & data management processes.
• Hands-on experience applying AI and agentic processes to data management processes preferred.

Business Focus & Communication Skills:
• Deep knowledge and interest in business concepts, entities and relationships relevant to a TV production & distribution studio.
• A proven track record of understanding complex data domains to effectively organize and manage data assets for analytical use.
• Strong communication skills to effectively collaborate non-technical stakeholders to gather requirements, and inherent curiosity to understand the business systems and processes where much of our data originates.

Peer Leadership: Demonstrated ability to define technical strategy, influence cross-functional teams, and drive execution. Ability to balance strategic thinking with execution and prioritize high-impact initiatives.

Preferred Qualifications
• Industry Experience: Experience in the media and entertainment industry is a plus, but candidates from other industries are welcome to apply.
• Passion for Entertainment: A genuine interest in film and television is appreciated but not mandatory.
• Strategic Mindset: Strong problem-solving skills and attention to detail.
• Collaborative Team Builder: Experience working in diverse, multicultural, and international environments.
• Continuous Learner: A commitment to ongoing learning and innovation.