Data Platform Engineer Jobs in Illinois

Our Story

At Alight, we believe a company’s success starts with its people. Alight embraces values that come directly from our people – purposeful, human, united and growth-minded – reflecting our inclusive culture and promise that our clients expect. We are passionate about connecting purpose with impact. Alight empowers clients to build a healthier and more financially secure workforce by unifying the benefits ecosystem across health, wealth, wellbeing, navigation, and absence management.

Our Benefits

With a comprehensive total rewards package, Alight offers programs and plans that support your mind, body, wallet, and life. Benefits include health, dental and vision coverages starting Day One. Additionally, Alight colleagues enjoy wellbeing programs, retirement plans with contribution matching, generous time off, parental leave, continuing education, and career growth opportunities – all within a thriving global organization.

Flexible Working

So that you can be your best at work and home, we consider flexible working arrangements wherever possible. Alight has been a leader in the flexible workspace and “Top 100 Company for Remote Jobs” 6 years in a row.

Great Place to Work

Thanks to the work of every colleague, Alight has received multiple awards of recognition including “Great Place to Work” for the past 7 years and Fortune’s “Best Companies to Work For.” To learn more about our company culture and awards Click Here.

We invite you to join our team! Learn more at careers.alight.com.

The infrastructure connecting employers, benefits administrators, insurance carriers, and service providers is extraordinarily complex and consequential to how people access and experience care, yet largely invisible to the millions who depend on it. Alight is investing in making this complexity actionable through its new Benefits Intelligence offering, powered by the Alight Data Engine. The Data Engine is a sophisticated benefits data platform that connects, standardizes, and enables the exchange of information across the fragmented benefits ecosystem.

The next challenge is scale: evolving a platform that already supports hundreds of data integrations to accommodate tens of thousands, without proportionally increasing engineering and operational effort required to support them. We’re seeking a hands-on Staff Data Platform Engineer to lead this evolution, designing and building the orchestration architecture, extensible data transformation frameworks, and developer tooling that makes new integrations faster to deploy, easier to operate, and more reliable at scale.

You’ll have substantial ownership over the platform’s technical direction and implementation, helping establish the foundation for a new generation of data-driven products and services across Alight.

What You Will Own

• Own the technical design, architecture, and implementation of the Data Engine’s ingestion, transformation, and orchestration infrastructure to materially increase Data Engine integration capacity and reduce manual engineering and operational effort.
• Design extensible data models, transformation frameworks and configuration-driven abstractions for standardizing heterogeneous client and source data.
• Build developer tooling and reusable platform capabilities that enable engineering and operational teams to independently develop, deploy, monitor and maintain data integrations.
• Design scalable orchestration and execution patterns that efficiently support thousands of independently managed data pipelines and workloads
• Improve platform reliability, observability and operational efficiency through automated validation, recovery, monitoring and infrastructure optimization.
• Partner with Product, Architecture, Software Engineering and Operations to align platform capabilities to product delivery and client rollout needs.

Required Execution Deliverables

• Scalable configuration-driven integration framework
• Reusable data models, transformation libraries and orchestration patterns
• Developer and operations tooling for independent integration delivery
• Reliability, observability and automated-recovery capabilities
• Platform standards, documentation, reference implementations and adoption guidance

What You Bring

• 8+ years of data platform, data engineering or software engineering experience with production-grade data systems.
• Deep knowledge of data modeling, SQL, transformation frameworks, orchestration and data quality.
• Extensive Python engineering skills and experience creating extensible frameworks, reusable abstractions and developer tooling.
• Demonstrated experience designing and scaling data platforms, including orchestration, pipeline execution, and infrastructure supporting large numbers of independently managed workloads
• Demonstrated experience designing configuration-driven systems that generalize complex processing requirements.
• Experience supporting production applications and operational workflows, beyond purely analytics or reporting workloads, with strong requirements for reliability, availability, and observability
• Demonstrated ability to independently establish technical direction and drive platform architecture and integrated delivery across Product and Engineering teams.
• Demonstrated fluency with approved agentic coding practices.

Preferred Experience

• Hands-on experience with Dagster or comparable modern data orchestration platforms.
• Healthcare or benefits data experience.
• Experience optimizing cloud infrastructure, platform cost and operational support models, particularly within AWS.

Application and Interview

By applying for a position with Alight, you understand that, should you be made an offer, it will be contingent on your undergoing and successfully completing a background check consistent with Alight’s employment policies. Background checks may include some or all the following based on the nature of the position: SSN/SIN validation, education verification, employment verification, and criminal check, search against global sanctions and government watch lists, credit check, and/or drug test. You will be notified during the hiring process which checks are required by the position.

Alight requires all virtual interviews to be conducted on video. Please be aware that Alight is a camera-on culture and may require occasional travel to one of our physical office locations.

Our commitment to Inclusion

We celebrate differences and believe in fostering an environment where everyone feels valued, respected, and supported. We know that diverse teams are stronger, more innovative, and more successful.

At Alight, we welcome and embrace all individuals, regardless of their background, and are dedicated to creating a culture that enables every employee to thrive. Join us in building a brighter, more inclusive future.

As part of this commitment, Alight will ensure that persons with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations for the hiring process. If reasonable accommodation is needed, please contact alightcareers@alight.com.

Equal Opportunity Policy Statement

Alight is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and does not discriminate against anyone based on sex, race, color, religion, creed, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, marital or domestic partner status, citizenship, military or veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, genetic information, or any other legally protected characteristics or conduct covered by federal, state, or local law. In addition, we take affirmative action to employ disabled persons, disabled veterans, and other covered veterans.

Alight provides reasonable accommodations to the known limitations of otherwise qualified employees and applicants for employment with disabilities and sincerely held religious beliefs, practices and observances, unless doing so would result in undue hardship. Applicants for employment may request reasonable accommodations/modifications by contacting their recruiter.

Authorization to work in the Employing Country

Applicants for employment in the country in which they are applying (Employing Country) must have work authorization that does not, now or in the future, require sponsorship of a visa for employment authorization in the Employing Country and with Alight.

Note, this job description does not restrict management's right to assign or reassign duties and responsibilities of this job to other entities; including but not limited to subsidiaries, partners, or purchasers of Alight business units.

We offer you a competitive total rewards package, continuing education & training, and tremendous potential with a growing worldwide organization.

Salary Pay Range

Minimum :

185,000.00 USD

Maximum :

235,000.00 USD

Pay Transparency Statement: Alight considers a variety of factors in determining whether to extend an offer of employment and in setting the appropriate compensation level, including, but not limited to, a candidate’s experience, education, certification/credentials, market data, internal equity, and geography. Alight makes these decisions on an individualized, non-discriminatory basis. Bonus and/or incentive eligibility are determined by role and level. Alight also offers a comprehensive benefits package; for specific details on our benefits package, please visit: Wellbeing and Benefits Selector Page - Alight

DISCLAIMER:

Nothing in this job description restricts management's right to assign or reassign duties and responsibilities of this job to other entities; including but not limited to subsidiaries, partners, or purchasers of Alight business units.

Alight Solutions provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, childbirth or related medical condition, veteran, marital, parental, citizenship, or domestic partner status, or any other status protected by applicable national, federal, state or local law. Alight Solutions is committed to a diverse workforce and is an affirmative action employer.