Executive Optimization Engineer Jobs in Illinois

Heidrick & Struggles is the world's foremost advisor on executive leadership, driving superior client performance through premier human capital leadership advisory services. For more than 70 years, we've delivered value for our clients by leveraging unrivaled expertise to help organizations discover and enable outstanding leaders and teams. Learn more atwww.heidrick.com

Job Description:

Who We Are:

Heidrick & Struggles is a premier provider of global leadership advisory and on-demand talent solutions, serving the senior-level talent and consulting needs of the world's top organizations. In our role as trusted leadership advisors, we partner with our clients to develop future-ready leaders and organizations, bringing together our services and offerings in executive search leadership assessment and development, organization and team acceleration, culture shaping and on-demand, independent talent solutions. Heidrick & Struggles pioneered the profession of executive search more than 70 years ago. Today, the firm provides integrated talent and human capital solutions to help our clients change the world, one leadership team at a time.

Additional information on the firm can be found at www.heidrick.com.

The Role

We are seeking a highly skilled, handson Senior Data Engineer with 4-5 years of experience to help shape and scale our data foundation in support of Heidrick & Struggles' mission to transform executive search and leadership advisory through datadriven insights. As a senior member of the data engineering team, you will own complex data solutions, drive best practices, and mentor junior engineers while ensuring our data platform is scalable, governed, and reliable.

You bring a builder's mindset and strong sense of ownership, connecting deeply to business needs to design robust pipelines, standardize structures, optimize performance, and enable trusted, selfservice analytics and AI across the firm. This role sits at the intersection of engineering and business strategy, requiring close collaboration with data science, analytics, product, and business stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable, secure data pipelines, data models, and warehouse/lake environments, primarily on Snowflake.
• Own endtoend data solutions from requirements gathering and design through implementation, testing, deployment, and iteration.
• Partner closely with crossfunctional stakeholders to translate business problems into robust data solutions, ensuring data is accessible, trustworthy, and actionable.
• Promote and contribute to best practices in data engineering (coding standards, testing, observability, documentation, and CI/CD).
• Mentor and support junior data engineers through code reviews, pairing, and guidance on design and implementation.
• Perform performance tuning, cost optimization, and reliability improvements in Snowflake and associated data pipelines.
• Contribute to documentation of data models, dictionaries, data flow maps, and metadata to support transparency and data governance.
• Collaborate with technical teams and stakeholders to implement data capture, ETL/ELT, validation, and QA, including automated quality checks and monitoring.
• Support the development and enforcement of data governance, access controls, and security policies in partnership with data governance and security teams.
• Stay up to date on emerging technologies, tools, and best practices in data engineering and bring forward recommendations that evolve our data platform.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Data & Analytics, Data Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 4-5 years of experience building and maintaining data lake/warehouse solutions and productiongrade data pipelines.
• Expertlevel proficiency in SQL, including complex queries, optimization, and stored procedures for data processing (expected "10/10" SQL capability).
• Handson experience with Snowflake (data modeling, performance tuning, and cost management).
• Proficiency in Python for data processing, orchestration, and automation.
• Experience designing, implementing, and operating ETL/ELT pipelines using modern pipeline tools and orchestration frameworks.
• Demonstrated experience mentoring or guiding junior engineers and contributing to teamlevel technical decisions.
• Solid understanding of data warehousing concepts, data modeling, and best practices for structured and semistructured data.
• Familiarity with CI/CD practices and tools (e.g., Gitbased workflows, automated testing, deployment pipelines).
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to nontechnical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with modern data stack tools such as FiveTran, or similar technologies.
• Exposure to data governance, data quality frameworks, and master or reference data management initiatives.
• Experience working in agile environments and leading workstreams or key stories within a crossfunctional team

Pay Range Guidelines for this Position:

The salary range for this position is 120000 USD to 130000 USD. Compensation is based on several factors including but not limited to education, work experience and skills. In addition to your salary, Heidrick & Struggles offers discretionary bonuses (subject to eligibility requirements) and a comprehensive benefits package including: medical, dental, vision, disability leave, parental leave, paid time off and 401k contribution (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). Note: we have a location based compensation structure; there may be a different range for candidates in other locations.

Heidrick & Struggles is an equal opportunity employer committed to hiring qualified protected veterans and individuals with disabilities. All qualified applicants will be considered for employment without regard to race, color, religion, creed, age, sex, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, marital status, veteran or military status, or citizenship status.