Job Description
Data Engineer
Department: Information Technology 500003
Employment Type: Full Time
Location: Sterling Heights
Reporting To: Matt Knutson
A Taste of Who We Are:
Backed by a tireless commitment to high quality, innovative culinary offerings and unparalleled client and guest services, Continental consistently ranks among the top contract dining and refreshment providers in the nation according to Food Management Magazine, the industry’s source for food service news and trends.
Our Mission
Delight our guest. Every meal. Every day.
Our Core Values
Exceptional – We recruit and retain phenomenal people who consistently go the extra mile to deliver results that lead the industry.
Hospitality – We are tirelessly committed to providing the highest quality food, beverages, and service by anticipating our guests' needs so they can count on memorable experiences every time.
Collaboration – We prioritize working together with a shared vision and effective & transparent communication, we unite as one team to achieve remarkable experiences.
Responsibility – we hold ourselves accountable to be there for our team and clients, to deliver what we say we will, when we say we will and check in on progress along the way.
Innovation – We are forward-thinkers always looking for new processes, technologies, and techniques to increase efficiencies and scalability to improve our services.
The Experience You’ll Create:
The Data Engineer is a hands-on technical contributor who plays a foundational role in building the data infrastructure that powers Continental’s analytics, reporting, and AI initiatives. This person will work at the intersection of our business systems and our growing data platform—designing and maintaining the pipelines, models, and processes that bring together data from across the organization into a reliable, unified foundation. We’re looking for someone who is technically strong, intellectually curious, and energized by working on problems that have a real and visible impact on how the business operates and grows.
- Design, build, and maintain scalable cloud-native data pipelines—including ETL/ELT, event-driven, and serverless patterns using Azure Functions and related services—that ingest, transform, and load data from Continental’s diverse source systems including ERP, POS, HRIS, and finance platforms into a centralized lake or data warehouse.
- Develop and maintain data models within Microsoft Fabric and Azure that support analytics, business intelligence, and emerging AI use cases, ensuring data is structured for both performance and usability.
- Integrate data from disparate systems across Continental’s business units into a unified enterprise data model, resolving inconsistencies and establishing a single source of truth for key business metrics.
- Implement and enforce data quality, validation, and monitoring practices that ensure downstream consumers—analysts, dashboards, and AI models—can trust the data they are working with.
- Collaborate closely with the Business Analyst and IT AI & Data Manager to understand reporting and analytics requirements, translating them into efficient, well-documented data solutions.
- Design and implement AI-augmented data engineering solutions—including AI agents, automated data quality processes, and intelligent pipeline components—that drive efficiency across Continental’s data platform. This is not a support role for AI; we’re looking for someone who can actively build and deploy AI-driven capabilities within the data engineering workflow.
- Build and optimize semantic models and datasets that power PowerBI dashboards and reports, working with analysts to ensure visualizations are backed by performant, accurate data.
- Contribute to data governance efforts by maintaining data dictionaries, pipeline documentation, and lineage tracking so the team can understand, trust, and build on the work being done.
- Monitor pipeline health, troubleshoot data failures, and proactively address issues before they impact reporting or downstream business processes.
- Stay current on developments in cloud data engineering, AI tooling, and the Microsoft data ecosystem, bringing new ideas and approaches to the team as the platform continues to mature.
- Support M&A and new business onboarding by connecting new source systems into existing pipelines and data models with minimal disruption to existing operations.
Ingredients for Thriving:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Engineering, Mathematics, or a related technical field.
- 3–5 years of experience in data engineering, with a portfolio of work that includes building and maintaining production-grade data pipelines and data models.
- Hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure data services and Microsoft Fabric—including Data Factory, Azure Functions, Synapse, and Lakehouse—as the primary stack. Experience with AWS data services is also relevant and viewed favorably, particularly where cloud architecture patterns are transferable.
- Strong SQL skills with experience writing complex queries, stored procedures, and transformations for large, multi-source datasets.
- Strong proficiency in Python for data engineering work—including pipeline development, data transformation, automation scripting, and cloud function development. Familiarity with other modern scripting languages or frameworks used in cloud-native data environments is a plus.
- Experience building semantic models or datasets that serve as the foundation for Power BI reporting, with an understanding of how modeling decisions affect performance and usability.
- Demonstrated hands-on experience applying AI within a data engineering context—implementing AI agents, integrating LLM-based processes into pipelines, or building AI-driven automation. Extensive experience is not required, but practical, working knowledge is essential; we want someone who has built something real in this space, not just read about it.
- A solid understanding of data quality, data governance, and data lineage principles, and experience applying them in a real production environment.
- Experience integrating data from multiple enterprise systems (ERP, POS, HRIS, CRM, or similar), with an ability to navigate source system complexity and build reliable connections between them.
- Strong communication skills with the ability to work alongside business analysts and non-technical stakeholders to understand requirements and explain technical decisions clearly.
- A curiosity-driven, growth-oriented mindset—someone who keeps up with the evolving data and AI landscape, takes ownership of their work end-to-end, and is always looking to improve how things are built.
Location(s) & Logistics:
- Prolonged periods of sitting at a desk and working on a computer.
- The role will be hybrid with locations in Sterling Heights and Troy.
- Occasional Travel is required for this role to visit customer sites and warehouses
Savor the Benefits:
We offer a range of benefits for eligibles team members, including:
- Health Coverage – Medical, Dental and Vision
- Voluntary Life/AD&D, Short-Term and Long-Term Disability, Critical Illness
- 401(k)
- Paid Time Off
- Paid Parental Leave
- Wellness Programs
- Additional Perks
