Position Title:
Data Engineer III
Pay Rate:
$83,000 - $121,000 Multiple factors, including Individual experience, skills and abilities will determine where an employee is ultimately placed in the pay range.
Category/Shift:
Salaried Full-Time
Physical Location:
75 5th Street NW Atlanta, GA 30308 United States
The Job You Will Perform:
The Data Engineer is an important member of the Cost Innovation Team, which is a strategic, innovative, and cross-functional team that is focused on creating value for the company through the advanced analytics of manufacturing data. This position offers a flexible working arrangement provided that the home office is within a typical commuting distance to the A2C office.
Core Responsibilities Analytics & Data Science Enablement
- Partner with analysts, data scientists, engineers, and business stakeholders to translate functional requirements into scalable technical data solutions.
- Deliver self-service, analytics-ready datasets that empower downstream teams to consume data without deep knowledge of underlying source systems.
- Enable industrial analytics use cases by providing trusted, contextualized time-series, asset, event, and operational data for analytics platforms and applications.
- Eliminate redundant data-preparation and contextualization efforts across disparate analytics and application teams.
- Help establish standard data definitions, reusable data products, and consistent business context across enterprise and industrial analytics environments.
- Support downstream analytics workflows, including advanced analytics, data science, visualization, and industrial process analytics.
Data Ingestion & Integration
- Design, build, and maintain robust pipelines to ingest data from relational databases, operational systems, industrial historians, APIs, cloud platforms, and flat files.
- Establish reliable and secure connections between source systems, cloud data platforms, and industrial data platforms.
- Write optimized SQL queries and extraction logic for high-performance data retrieval.
- Implement flexible ingestion patterns including batch, incremental, streaming, and replication-based approaches based on business latency requirements.
- Integrate high-volume time-series data and industrial metadata while maintaining relationships between assets, measurements, events, and other operational entities.
- Support ingestion and integration patterns used by platforms such as Cognite Data Fusion (CDF), Seeq, and Microsoft Fabric.
Data Storage & Lakehouse Engineering
- Design and manage scalable storage structures across raw (bronze), intermediate (silver), and curated (gold) layers.
- Leverage Spark-native formats and engines such as Delta Lake to support scalable analytics workloads.
- Design curated data structures that support both enterprise analytics and industrial data consumption.
- Enforce data retention, archiving, and purging policies to manage data lifecycles.
- Monitor and optimize storage, compute costs, and cloud resource utilization.
Data Transformation
- Develop Python and SQL-based transformations to clean, standardize, enrich, and unify data.
- Develop, tune, and proactively optimize scalable PySpark applications to efficiently process high-volume datasets.
- Build modular, reusable transformation components rather than siloed, application-specific logic.
- Resolve complex data-quality anomalies including schema drift, missing values, duplicates, timestamp alignment, and inconsistent identifiers.
- Engineer efficient incremental processing patterns to handle high-volume, frequently changing datasets.
- Transform raw operational and historian data into analytics-ready time series, calculations, conditions, events, and contextualized datasets for downstream consumption.
- Enable reusable data transformations that can support platforms such as Seeq, Cognite, Fabric, and custom analytics applications.
Semantic Modeling & Industrial Data Contextualization
- Translate complex source schemas into intuitive, business-aligned semantic entities, asset hierarchies, and industrial data models.
- Build and maintain relationships between assets, equipment, time series, events, files, and other operational data.
- Standardize naming conventions, identifiers, metadata, and relationship mappings across source systems.
- Perform data contextualization to connect operational data with relevant equipment, process, and business context.
- Support asset-centric and knowledge-graph-style data models commonly used in industrial data platforms such as Cognite.
Pipeline Orchestration & Operations
- Architect end-to-end workflows that seamlessly coordinate ingestion, transformation, contextualization, validation, and publication.
- Orchestrate data movement between source systems, lakehouse environments, industrial data platforms, and analytics applications.
- Implement resilient error handling including retries, automated recovery, checkpointing, and alerting.
- Monitor pipeline health, SLA compliance, data freshness, and data drift using centralized observability tools.
- Design pipelines capable of supporting both traditional enterprise data and high-frequency industrial time-series workloads.
Data Governance, Security & DevOps
- Enforce data security and privacy standards, including row- and column-level security, RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), and masking of sensitive data.
- Apply consistent access-control and governance patterns across enterprise data platforms and industrial analytics environments.
- Embed automated validation checks as needed to enforce data quality.
- Maintain Git-based development workflows using branching, code reviews, and pull requests.
- Implement automated CI/CD pipelines for code testing, data validation, configuration management, and repeatable environment deployments.
- Support deployment and lifecycle management of data pipelines, transformation logic, semantic models, and analytics configurations across development, test, and production environments.
- Maintain comprehensive documentation of data architectures, pipeline schemas, source-to-target mappings, contextual relationships, and lineage maps.
Preferred Experience
- Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Science, Engineering, or related field + 2 years of relevant experience; equivalent Master’s degree accepted; non-relevant bachelor’s degree requires 5+ years of equivalent hands-on experience.
- Experience working with:
- SQL and Python for data engineering and transformation.
- PySpark and Microsoft Fabric for lakehouse transformations.
The Benefits You Will Enjoy:
International Paper offers a benefits package that includes health, welfare and retirement plans including Medical, Dental, Life insurance, Flexible Spending Accounts, Short-term and Long-term Disability, 401(k), Company-funded retirement contributions, Paid Time Off, Education & Development (including Tuition Reimbursement), Student Loan Repayment Assistance, and Voluntary Benefits including insurance for home, auto, vision and pets
The Career You Will Build:
Leadership training, promotional opportunities
The Impact You Will Make:
We continue to build a better future for people, the planet, and our company! IP has been a good steward of sustainable practices across communities around the world for more than 125 years. Join our team and you’ll see why our team members say they’re Proud to be IP.
The Culture You Will Experience:
International Paper promotes employee well-being by providing safe, caring and inclusive workplaces. We have team members all around the world with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. These are our strengths. We are committed to creating a culture where all individuals are respected, valued, engaged and have an opportunity to do their best work every day. We invite you to bring your uniqueness, creativity, talents, experiences, and safety mindset to be a part of our increasingly inclusive and diverse culture.
The Company You Will Join:
International Paper (NYSE: IP; LSE: IPC) creates sustainable packaging solutions that enable our customers, teammates and shareowners to thrive in an ever-changing world. We are a leader in corrugated packaging, partnering with customers across industries to protect what matters most, strengthen supply chains and create lasting value. Learn more at internationalpaper.com.
International Paper is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, age, or any other characteristic protected by law. International Paper complies with federal and state disability laws and makes reasonable accommodations for applicants and employees with disabilities. If reasonable accommodation is needed to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job functions, and/or to receive other benefits and privileges of employment, please contact reasonable.accommodations@ipaper.com or (877) 973-3919.
