Senior Data Engineer-Right of Way(ROW)Technology Risk and Reduction
Oakland, CA, US, 94612
Requisition ID # 174878
Job Category: Information Technology
Job Level: Individual Contributor
Business Unit: Energy Delivery
Work Type: Hybrid
Job Location: Oakland; Alameda; Alta; American Canyon; Angels Camp; Antioch; Auberry; Auburn; Avenal; Avila Beach; Bakersfield; Balch Camp; Bay Point; Bear Valley; Belden; Bellota; Belmont; Benicia; Berkeley; Brentwood; Brisbane; Buellton; Burney; Buttonwillow; Calistoga; Campbell; Canyon Dam; Canyondam; Capitola; Caruthers; Chico; Clearlake; Clovis; Coalinga; Colusa; Concord; Concord; Corcoran; Cotati; Cottonwood; Cupertino; Daly City; Danville; Davis; Dinuba; Downieville; Dublin; Emeryville; Eureka; Fairfield; Folsom; Fort Bragg; Fortuna; Fremont; French Camp; Fresno; Fresno; Fulton; Garberville; Geyserville; Gilroy; Goodyear; Grass Valley; Guerneville; Half Moon Bay; Hayward; Hinkley; Hollister; Holt; Huron; Jackson; Kerman; King City; Lakeport; Lemoore; Lincoln; Linden; Livermore; Lodi; Loomis; Los Banos; Lower Lake; Madera; Magalia; Manteca; Manton; Mariposa; Martell; Marysville; Maxwell; Menlo Park; Merced; Meridian; Millbrae; Milpitas; Modesto; Monterey; Montgomery Creek; Morgan Hill; Morro Bay; Moss Landing; Mountain View; Napa; Needles; Newark; Newman; Novato; Oakdale; Oakhurst; Oakley; Olema; Orinda; Orland; Oroville; Palo Alto; Palo Cedro; Paradise; Parkwood; Paso Robles; Petaluma; Pioneer; Pismo Beach; Pittsburg; Placerville; Pleasant Hill; Pleasanton; Point Arena; Potter Valley; Quincy; Rancho Cordova; Red Bluff; Redding; Richmond; Ridgecrest; Rio Vista; Rocklin; Roseville; Round Mountain; Sacramento; Salida; Salinas; San Bruno; San Carlos; San Francisco; San Francisco; San Jose; San Luis Obispo; San Mateo; San Rafael; San Ramon; San Ramon; Sanger; Santa Cruz; Santa Maria; Santa Nella; Santa Rosa; Selma; Shaver Lake; Sonoma; Sonora; South San Francisco; Springville; Stockton; Storrie; Taft; Tracy; Turlock; Twain; Ukiah; Vacaville; Vallejo; Walnut Creek; Wasco; Watsonville; West Sacramento; Wheatland; Whitmore; Willits; Willow Creek; Willows; Windsor; Winters; Woodland; Yuba City
Department Overview
The Right-of-Way Risk Reduction Strategy (ROWRS) team within Electric Transmission Engineering establishes a risk-based, technology-enabled approach to identify, prioritize, and resolve electric right-of-way encroachments and clearance issues. The team partners across Electric Operations, Land, Legal, Wildfire Risk, IT, Data and Analytics, and other functions to improve risk visibility, standardize processes, and support sustained reduction of right-of-way risk across PG&E’s service territory.
Position Summary
The Senior Data Engineer is the hands-on technical builder for the Right-of-Way Risk Reduction Strategy data ecosystem. This role designs, builds, and operates the data pipelines, system integrations, and reporting infrastructure that power ROWRS encroachment risk analytics and case management.
The role delivers the platform layer: ingesting and integrating data from Salesforce, SAP, Esri ArcGIS, LiDAR and remote-sensing sources, and other enterprise systems into Palantir Foundry; building and maintaining the transformation pipelines and curated data products the risk models consume.
This role works in close partnership with the ROWRS data science function, which defines the analytical methodology, risk model design, and the data requirements this role implements. The role is accountable for the technical delivery, reliability, performance, and maintainability of that platform.
The role will help transition ROW encroachment management from predominantly manual identification and case management toward a more proactive, technology-enabled, data-driven operating model. This includes identifying and evaluating opportunities to leverage GIS, LiDAR, spatial analytics, enterprise applications, data integration, automation, machine learning, and other emerging technologies to detect potential encroachments earlier, improve risk visibility, support risk-based prioritization, and enable more efficient remediation.
The position will partner with Electric Operations, Land & Environmental Management, Legal, Wildfire Risk, Asset Management, IT, and Data & Analytics teams to evaluate, pilot, and implement an integrated technology ecosystem that supports identification, prioritization, tracking, and resolution of right-of-way encroachments and minimum clearance violations.
The role will provide technical leadership throughout the solution design, development, testing, implementation, and operationalization.
Business continuity, operational risk, data quality, security, scalability, maintainability, and enterprise technology standards will be incorporated into solution evaluation and implementation decisions.
This position is hybrid, working from your remote office and your assigned location at least twice a week and or based on business need.
PG&E is providing the salary range that the company in good faith believes it might pay for this position at the time of the job posting. This compensation range is specific to the locality of the job. The actual salary paid to an individual will be based on multiple factors, including, but not limited to, specific skills, education, licenses or certifications, experience, market value, geographic location, and internal equity. Although we estimate the successful candidate hired into this role will be placed towards the middle or entry point of the range, the decision will be made on a case-by-case basis related to these factors.
Bay Area Minimum: $122,000
Bay Area Mid:$158,000
Bay Maximum: $194,000
California Minimum: $116,000
California Mid:$150,000
California Maximum:$184,000
This job is also eligible to participate in PG&E’s discretionary incentive compensation programs.
Job Responsibilities
Data Pipeline Engineering & Operations (35%)
- Design, build, and operate PySpark transformation pipelines in Palantir Foundry across Raw, Clean, and Product layers
- Onboard and maintain source datasets from Salesforce, SAP, Esri ArcGIS, LiDAR and remote-sensing extracts, vegetation and inspection systems, outage and incident history, and work management.
- Implement joins, deduplication, key management, and slowly-changing-dimension handling against the documented data model.
- Implement null-handling, imputation, and defensive-default logic for known (surveyed/historical) and unknown (predictive-estimate) encroachment records, per the specifications provided by the data science function.
- Instrument pipelines with data-quality checks, schema-drift detection, and structured logging; route unresolvable data gaps back to source-system owners through a defined exception process.
- Monitor scheduled builds, resolve failures, manage backfills, and maintain freshness and reliability SLAs.
- Optimize partitioning, incremental build strategy, and compute cost.
- Ensure technology solutions support regulatory, compliance, wildfire risk, and operational objectives.
Reporting & BI Development Support (15%)
- Build and maintain Power BI reports and dashboards to specifications and metric definitions provided by the data science function and program stakeholders.
- Implement DAX measures, data model relationships, row-level security, incremental refresh, and gateway configuration.
- Produce and maintain star-schema fact and dimension datasets optimized for VertiPaq performance.
- Support dashboard performance, refresh reliability, and workspace and deployment-pipeline hygiene.
- Triage report defects and handle enhancement requests.
Platform Integration & Solution Delivery (30%)
Provide technology leadership for initiatives involving:
- Salesforce
- Case management
- Workflow automation
- Customer outreach tracking
- Resolution management
- Palantir Foundry
- Data integration
- Operational data products
- Analytics workflows
- Deployment and scheduling of risk models developed by the data science function.
- SAP
- Asset data integration
- Financial reporting
- Work management interfaces
- Master data management
- GIS / Spatial Technologies
- Esri ArcGIS
- Spatial analytics
- Encroachment identification
- Asset proximity analysis
- LiDAR and remote-sensing data
- Mapping and visualization
- Geospatial data integration and analysis
- Data & Analytics
- Python-based analytics
- Data quality automation
- Workflow automation
- Productionizing and scheduling analytical models
- Power BI
- Executive dashboards
- KPI reporting
- Portfolio management reporting
- Risk and performance analytics
Technology Governance & Stakeholder Management (10%)
- Serve as the ROWRS technical interface to IT, Enterprise architecture, and platform teams for integration, access provisioning, security review, and enterprise standards compliance.
- Support ROWRS solution design discussions and lead technical design sessions with enterprise technology partners.
- Communicate project status, risks, issues, decisions, and dependencies.
- Navigate enterprise data access approvals, system provisioning, and vendor and platform coordination on behalf of the program.
- Support organizational change management and user adoption efforts where technology changes impact business processes and operating models.
Testing, Implementation & Operationalization (10%)
- Lead solution validation and support end-to-end testing, including requirements validation, system/integration testing, and user acceptance testing.
- Ensure requirements and acceptance criteria are traceable through testing and implementation.
- Support transition of solutions into sustainable operational ownership, including support models, governance, documentation, and business continuity considerations.
- Measure realization of business value and operational benefits.
This role and the ROWRS data science function operate as a paired delivery team. The data science function owns risk methodology, model design, feature and metric definitions, validation standards, and the analytical data requirements. This role owns the technical implementation: pipeline design and construction, system integration, platform operations, and reporting delivery. Technical implementation decisions rest with this role. Analytical methodology and data-requirement decisions rest with the data science function. Both roles jointly shape solution scope and sequencing with program leadership.
Qualifications
Minimum:
- Bachelor's degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, Business Administration, Data Analytics, or related field.
- 5+ years of hands-on data engineering, integration engineering, or analytics engineering experience, OR Master's degree and 6+ years.
- Production experience building and operating Spark/PySpark pipelines.
- Experience integrating enterprise systems (Salesforce, SAP, GIS, or equivalent) into an analytics platform.
- Experience building and maintaining Power BI reports, including DAX and data model optimization.
- SQL and Python proficiency.
- Experience with multi-tier enterprise technology environments
- Experience working with staff across diverse IT disciplines.
- Experience building and implementing technology solutions involving enterprise applications, information/data models, integrations, spatial technologies, analytics, or solution architecture within a complex enterprise or utility environment.
- Experience gathering and documenting business requirements.
- Experience supporting utility, infrastructure, asset management, wildfire risk, or operational programs preferred.
Desired
- Master’s Degree
- Project Management Professional (PMP) certification
- Technology, architecture, data, GIS, cloud, or other job-related certification.
- Experience with emerging technologies, spatial analytics, LiDAR, machine learning, artificial intelligence, or predictive analytics.
- Experience leading technology pilots, proofs of concept, prototypes, or emerging technology evaluations.
- Hands-on Palantir Foundry experience (Code Repositories, Pipeline Builder, Ontology, Data Health).
- Geospatial data engineering: ArcGIS layers, coordinate systems, spatial joins, LiDAR-derived datasets.
- Experience productionizing statistical or machine learning models built by others.
Functional Knowledge:
- Electrical utility operations
- Asset management processes
- Land rights, easements, or right-of-way programs
- Risk management and mitigation programs
- Regulatory compliance programs
- Operational risk and business continuity considerations.
- Enterprise technology strategy and solution delivery.
- Data governance, data quality, and information management.
Technical Experience:
Experience with several of the following:
- Salesforce
- Palantir Foundry
- SAP
- Esri ArcGIS
- GIS / spatial analytics
- LiDAR / remote sensing
- Power BI
- SQL
- Python
- Azure Data Services
- Data governance and master data management
- Machine learning and predictive analytics
- Workflow automation
- Enterprise application integration
- Emerging technology evaluation and proof-of-concept development
- PySpark / distributed data processing
Collaboration & Communication Skills:
- Executive communication and presentation skills
- Facilitation and stakeholder engagement
- Technology solution evaluation and decision-making.
- Ability to translate complex technical concepts into business implications and recommendations.
- Change management
- Strategic problem solving and systems thinking.
- Ability to work from analytical specifications and hold implementations to them.
Success Measures:
Within the first 12-18 months, the successful candidate will:
- ROWRS Foundry pipelines running on schedule with monitored data-health checks; priority source systems ingested and validated; enterprise data access blockers cleared.
- Salesforce, SAP, Foundry, and GIS integration operational; risk models deployed and scheduled in production; platform operations documented such that no component is single-threaded on one person; measurable reduction in analytics cycle time.
- Identify and evaluate opportunities to leverage GIS, LiDAR, spatial analytics, automation, machine learning, and other emerging technologies to improve encroachment detection and risk visibility.
- Lead or support pilots/proofs of concept that demonstrate measurable business value and technical feasibility.
- Enable integration between Salesforce, Foundry, SAP, and GIS and other relevant enterprise data sources.
- Support deployment of analytics and reporting capabilities that improve risk visibility and enable risk-informed prioritization and decision-making.
- Reduce manual processes through workflow automation spatial analysis, data integration, and enterprise system capabilities.
- Improve data quality, traceability, data governance, and executive reporting across the ROWRS program.
- Establish scalable, sustainable technology capabilities that support proactive identification, prioritization, monitoring, and remediation of ROW risks.
- Demonstrate measurable improvements in process efficiency, data visibility, risk management, and operational effectiveness.
- Help establish scalable technology capabilities supporting long-term operationalization of the ROWRS strategy.
Nearest Major Market: San Francisco
Nearest Secondary Market: Oakland