Principal Data Platform Engineer Jobs in Summit, NJ

The Manager of Data Platform Engineering, is responsible for leading, developing, and organizing a high-performing team of data platform engineers. You will own the people, process, and delivery health of your team - ensuring engineers are growing in their careers, teams are delivering reliably, and the platform function is well-coordinated with the broader organization.
This is a first-line management role that sits at the intersection of technical credibility and people leadership, you must possess sufficient technical depth to earn trust, participate meaningfully in architectural conversations, remove engineering blockers, and make informed decisions about resourcing and prioritization.
You will partner closely with the Lead Data Platform Engineer to ensure alignment between technical direction and team execution. While the Lead owns architecture and standards, you own: hiring, career development, performance, team health, and delivery operations. Together, you form the leadership unit for the Data Platform function.
This role is ideal for a seasoned senior engineer who has made the deliberate choice to grow into engineering leadership, or an experienced engineering manager who wants to operate in the dynamic, high-impact world of data infrastructure.
Key Responsibilities
People Leadership & Team Development

• Directly manage 4-5 data platform engineers across levels (Engineer I through Senior Engineer III); serve as their primary advocate, coach, and career guide.
• Conduct regular 1:1s with each direct report focused on growth, blockers, wellbeing, and career trajectory.
• Own the career development plans for each team member; set clear expectations at every level, identify growth opportunities, and provide timely, actionable feedback.
• Drive performance management end-to-end: set goals, provide continuous feedback.
• Identify high-potential engineers and create stretch opportunities that accelerate their development toward the next level.
• Foster a team culture of psychological safety, inclusion, continuous learning, and high accountability - where engineers feel empowered to take initiative and safe to raise concerns.
• Address performance gaps early and constructively

Hiring & Organizational Design

• Own the full recruitment lifecycle for your team: define headcount needs, write and refine job descriptions, run structured interview processes, and make hiring decisions.
• Partner with recruiting to build and maintain a healthy pipeline of engineering talent at all levels; actively source candidates and represent the company at recruiting events.
• Onboard new hires effectively: ensure they have a structured ramp plan, a buddy/mentor, and clear 30/60/90-day expectations from day one.

Delivery Operations & Program Management

• Own the health of the team's delivery system: sprint cadence, backlog grooming, capacity planning, dependency management, and release coordination.
• Ensure the team consistently delivers against commitments; proactively identify risks, surface blockers early, and create conditions for engineers to do their best work.
• Establish and maintain clear team-level SLAs, on-call rotations, and incident response processes; hold the team accountable to reliability standards.
• Drive quarterly planning in coordination with the Lead Engineer and Director: translate organizational priorities into team-level goals, milestones, and resourcing decisions.
• Manage cross-team dependencies with partner engineering organizations (ML, Analytics); ensure alignment and resolve conflicts at the manager level.
• Own team-level reporting and status communication to leadership: weekly/bi-weekly updates, risk flags, and delivery summaries that give stakeholders accurate, timely visibility.

Technical Partnership & Credibility

• Maintain sufficient technical depth to participate in architectural discussions, evaluate engineering trade-offs, assess estimates, and identify when the team is over- or under-resourced for a given problem.
• Partner closely with the Lead Data Platform Engineer to ensure technical direction is translated into executable work; bridge the gap between architectural vision and sprint-level delivery.
• Represent technical considerations in cross-functional conversations - with infrastructure, Data Science, Analytics, and Directors - and advocate for necessary infrastructure investment.
• Contribute to technical decisions where your perspective as a manager is valuable: team ergonomics, tooling adoption, process improvements, and build-vs-buy trade-offs with organizational implications.
• Stay current with data platform trends and adjacent technologies to have informed conversations with your team and with engineering leadership about the evolving landscape.

Stakeholder Management & Organizational Influence

• Serve as the primary point of contact for partner Information Systems & Services(ISS) managers, and business stakeholders on matters of team delivery, capacity, and roadmap alignment.
• Represent the Data Platform Engineering team in cross-functional planning forums, leadership reviews, and all-hands; communicate team accomplishments, challenges, and needs clearly.
• Proactively build relationships with peer managers across the organization to improve cross-team collaboration, reduce friction, and identify shared investment opportunities.
• Partner with the Executive Director on budget planning, headcount justification, and tooling procurement decisions that affect the team.

Contribute to shaping the engineering culture and management practices across the broader engineering organization - share what works, contribute to manager forums, and help raise the bar on people leadership
Qualifications
Required Qualifications:

• 8-13 years of total professional experience in software or data engineering, with at least 1-2 years in an engineering management role with direct reports.
• Demonstrated ability to recruit, develop, and retain engineering talent across levels; track record of building high-performing, cohesive teams.
• Proven experience delivering complex technical programs on time - able to manage scope, risk, dependencies, and stakeholder expectations across multiple concurrent workstreams.
• Sufficient technical depth in data engineering to earn team trust: experience with data pipelines, cloud data infrastructure, and distributed systems.
• Strong command of engineering management fundamentals: 1:1s, performance reviews, goal-setting, career development frameworks, and compensation discussions.
• Excellent communication skills - written and verbal - with the ability to tailor messaging for engineers, technical peers, and senior non-technical leadership alike.
• Experience running agile delivery processes (Scrum, Kanban, or hybrid) and maintaining team-level metrics that inform planning and forecasting.
• Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity, make decisions with incomplete information, and maintain team direction and morale in periods of organizational change.
• Self-aware, empathetic, direct, and skilled at giving feedback that is candid, kind, and growth-oriented.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior hands-on experience as a data platform or data infrastructure engineer; deep familiarity with the technical landscape your team operates in (Spark, Airflow, Snowflake, Kafka, dbt, etc.).
• Experience managing engineers in a platform-as-a-product or internal developer platform context, where the team's customers are other engineering teams.
• Background leading teams through significant technical transformation programs - cloud migrations, architecture re-platforms, or tooling overhauls.
• Experience building and scaling engineering teams in a high-growth environment, including rapid hiring, onboarding, and org design iterations.
• Familiarity with engineering leveling frameworks and the ability to calibrate performance and promotion decisions consistently across a team.
• Exposure to data governance, compliance, or regulatory requirements (GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA) that affect platform design and operations.
  Education:
  Bachelors Degree in CS, IT or relevant majors

About Us
At Atlantic Health, our promise to our communities is; Anyone who enters one of our facilities will receive the highest quality care delivered at the right time, at the right place, and at the right cost. This commitment is also echoed in the respect, development and opportunities we give to our more than 22,000 team members. Headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey, we are one of the leading non-profit health care systems in the nation. Our facilities and sites of care include:

• Atlantic Health Morristown Medical Center, Morristown, NJ
• Atlantic Health Overlook Medical Center, Summit, NJ
• Atlantic Health Newton Medical Center, Newton, NJ
• Atlantic Health Chilton Medical Center, Pompton Plains, NJ
• Atlantic Health Hackettstown Medical Center, Hackettstown, NJ
• Atlantic Health Goryeb Children's Hospital, Morristown, NJ
• Atlantic Health CentraState Healthcare System, Freehold, NJ
• Atlantic Medical Group
• Atlantic Visiting Nurse
• Atlantic Mobile Health
• Atlantic Rehabilitation

We have more than 900 community-based healthcare providers affiliated through Atlantic Medical Group.
We have received awards and recognition for the services we have provided to our patients, team members and communities. Below are just a few of our accolades:

• Chosen for 17 years by Fortune as one of the magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work For."
• Atlantic Health Morristown and Atlantic Health Overlook Named by Newsweek as two of the "World's Best Hospitals" in 2026.
• Atlantic Health Morristown and Atlantic Health Overlook ranked within the top three hospitals in New Jersey by U.S. News & World Report's 2025-2026 Best Hospital rankings.
• Atlantic Health scored four "A" grades by The Leapfrog Group in its Fall 2025 Hospital Safety Grades, performance measures reflecting errors, accidents, injuries and injections, as well as systems hospitals have in place to prevent harm.
• Atlantic Health Morristown and Atlantic Health Overlook are New Jersey's only hospitals to be named among America's 50 Best hospitals by Healthgrades in 2026.
• Named by Becker's Healthcare as one of the "165 Top Places to Work in Healthcare - 2026.
• Atlantic Health Morristown, Atlantic Health Overlook, Atlantic Health Chilton and Atlantic Health Newton all Forbes Top Hospitals for 2026.
• Named by Newsweek as one of America's Greatest Workplaces for Inclusion & Diversity 2025.
• Atlantic Health rated LEVEL 9 - 2025 CHIME Digital Health Most Wired.

Atlantic Health offers a competitive and comprehensive Total Rewards package that supports the health, financial security, and well-being of all team members. Offerings vary based on role level (Team Member, Director, Executive). Below is a general summary, with role-specific enhancements highlighted:
Team Member Benefits

• Medical, Dental, Vision, Prescription Coverage (22.5 hours per week or above for full-time and part-time team members)
• Life & AD&D Insurance.
• Short-Term and Long-Term Disability (with options to supplement)
• 403(b) Retirement Plan: Employer match, additional non-elective contribution
• PTO & Paid Sick Leave
• Tuition Assistance, Advancement & Academic Advising
• Parental, Adoption, Surrogacy Leave
• Backup and On-Site Childcare
• Well-Being Rewards
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Fertility Benefits, Healthy Pregnancy Program
• Flexible Spending & Commuter Accounts
• Pet, Home & Auto, Identity Theft and Legal Insurance

Note: In Compliance with the NJ Pay Transparency Act (effective Sunday, June 1, 2025), all job postings will include the hourly wage or salary (or a range), as well as this summary of benefits. Final compensation and benefit eligibility may vary by role and employment status and will be confirmed at the time of offer.
EEO STATEMENT
Atlantic Health, Inc. is an equal employment opportunity employer and federal contractor or subcontractor and therefore abides by applicable laws to protect applicants and employees from discrimination in hiring, promotion, discharge, pay, fringe benefits, job training, classification, referral, and other aspects of employment, on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, gender identity and sexual orientation), national origin, citizenship status, disability, age, genetics, or veteran
About the Team
Atlantic Health System is at the forefront of medicine, setting standards for quality health care powered by a workforce of more than 18,000 team members and 4,800 affiliated physicians dedicated to building healthier communities, the system offers more than 400 sites of care, including eight award-winning medical centers. Specializing in cardiovascular care, cancer care, orthopedics, neuroscience, pediatrics, women's health and rehabilitation medicine. Atlantic Medical Group, comprised of 1,000 physicians and advanced practice providers, represents one of the largest multi-specialty practices in New Jersey and includes finance, legal, marketing, human resources, talent acquisition, ISS and more. Caring for our patients, our team members and the communities we serve is our central mission.