Data Engineer

Data Engineer

Location: 5000 Kansas Avenue Kansas City, KS 66106

Department: IT

Make us your BEST Choice! 

Associated Wholesale Grocers (AWG) is transforming our business intelligence, analytics, and data automation capabilities. The goal is to level up data warehousing and data management capabilities, including curated and cleansed data sets, certified data models and sources. We are adapting to cloud-based data automation for data cleansing, extraction, loading, transformations and visualizations. Another goal is to expand storage and compute capacity for ingestion of structured and unstructured data.

As an Associate Analyst (Data Engineer) on the Data Analytics Team, you will be integral to this journey. Your primary area of responsibility will be building a strong data ecosystem which supports a new company-wide business intelligence and analytics environment. You will assist in the design and development of standardized datasets derived from multiple systems of record. A key area of success for this role is developing or applying existing development and scripting skills in process automation to orchestrate data pipelines from business systems, data lakes and third-party data repositories. You will be creating and loading dimensional models that will be used for analysis and reporting. As you work on projects and enhancements you will assist in refining data governance within business processes and the technical tool chain. A key to success in this role is to quickly learn the meaning of business data and understand the business domain. 

Scope: This role is a learning position that requires hands-on review and supervision from leads, managers and occasionally Directors.

Position Responsibilities:

Support Availability and Services (50-60%)

• Troubleshoot and develop solutions to problems, including using AWG approved AI tools such as Gemini, CoPilot and NotebookLM.
• Collaborate with other developers and support engineers to resolve production, enhancement or development issues.
• Participate in an on-call rotation for integration and transformation pipelines, legacy systems, and modern data platforms that may involve occasional off-hours and weekend support.
• Take ownership of following on-call procedures and instituting permanent fixes for repetitive problems.
• Maintain documentation for legacy systems, jobs, modern pipelines, and modernization implementation.
• Understand and implement change control procedures (including RFC, CAB, CI/CD).

Deliver Solutions (25%)

• Build real-time and batch data integrations from disparate source systems into the data lake/data warehouse/delta lake.
• Build and maintain scalable ETL processes using workflow automation tools.
• Provide documentation (including Technical Design Documents) for installations and deliverables.
• Design dimensional models and be able to cleanse and transform raw data into structured formats.
• Administer and maintain data pipelines used for loading data into the data warehouse or lakehouse.
• Scale and tune data pipelines, data sets, and SQL queries.
• Responsible for Unit testing, support of Integration testing, and User Acceptance Testing.
• Required Basic Skills: Develops timely and proper change documentation. Proactively communicates status to key stakeholders to diagnose and ensure delivery is on track. Takes ownership of assignments. Proactively drives results and seeks support when hitting barriers. Exhibits curiosity to understand how changes fit into the overall scope.

Learning and Continuous Improvement (10-20%)

• Responsible for understanding and adoption of IT Architecture practice.
• Continuous learning of existing and future data technologies and tools.
• Apply standard methodologies to analyze, design, develop, test, and deploy data management solutions.
• Participate in agile story authoring, sizing, and demo sessions for developed features.
• Participate in code reviews and receive feedback from the team.
• Propose process improvements for continuous department maturity.

Align Roadmap and Strategy (5%)

• Collaborate with business partners to understand their business problems or needs and desired outcomes.
• In collaboration with other members of the team and user community, configure cloud-based capabilities that enable the AWG community.
• Communicate priorities to the technology organization to drive effective business solutions.
• Maintain verbal and written issue identification and status updates to cross-functional teams and leadership.

Position Requirements:

• Experience: 1-3 years of data engineering or related experience (Associate Analyst level). Basic understanding of data modelling, mapping and data quality/governance practices.
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in software engineering, computer science, computer information systems, or related degree, or equivalent professional experience.
• SQL Skills: Must be able to read/write SQL in the following environments (SQL Server, Oracle, DB2).
• Cloud Experience: Experience working in cloud data environments (AWS, Azure). Experience working with AWS or Azure workflow orchestration tools.
• Data Systems: Experience working with one or more columnar storage systems (Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, etc.).
• Process: Must have completed at least one full cycle of building a data lake and/or a data warehouse.
• Analytical Skills: Knowledge and skills with Power BI will be important, not critical.
• Soft Skills: Strong business communications skills for requirements gathering and development. Ability to multi-task and change priorities.

Nice To Have:

• Worked with or built Data Lakes, Data Warehouse in a hybrid environment (cloud / on-premises).
• Experience working with CRM systems like Salesforce.
• Experience with end-to-end supply chain or merchandising.
• Exposure to data streaming tools and technologies like Kafka, TensorFlow or similar.
• Basic knowledge and understanding of statistics and awareness of data science methodologies.

Associated Wholesale Grocers, Inc. (AWG) is the nation’s largest cooperative food wholesaler to independently owned supermarkets, serving 1,100 member companies and 3,500 locations throughout 33 states from 9 wholesale division support centers. Consolidated sales for AWG in 2024 were $12.1 billion. In addition to its cooperative wholesale operations, the company also operates subsidiary companies that provide certain real estate and supermarket development services, and pharmaceutical products. For more information, visit AWGinc.com.

 Benefits:

• Medical, Dental, & Vision Insurance

• Health Savings Account

• Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account

• Paid Vacation, Holiday, and Sick Time

• 401(k) with 4% match along with 3 other contributions

• Tuition Reimbursement

• Basic & Supplemental Life and AD&D

• Employee Assistance Program

• Short-Term and Long-Term Disability 

• Wellness Program

• Yearly Holiday Bonus