Principal Data Engineer

Attain Finance • ,

10d • $170,000 - $190,000 • Remote

About The Position

The Principal Data Engineer is a hands-on technical leader responsible for shaping and improving Attain Finance’s data architecture and engineering practices. The role identifies opportunities to modernize the data platform, recommends solutions to complex business and technical challenges, and leads their implementation. Working across business domains, Data Engineering, Software Engineering, BI, Cloud, and Security, the position provides architectural guidance and drives improvements in data quality, reliability, security, and engineering efficiency.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• At least 8 years of experience in data engineering, data architecture, or data platform development, including technical leadership of complex production systems.
• Advanced hands-on experience with Snowflake, SQL, Python, and Apache Airflow, including data modeling, pipeline development, performance optimization, and troubleshooting.
• Experience designing data integration and cloud-based data architectures, including AWS services.
• Demonstrated ability to independently identify architectural problems, evaluate alternatives, propose improvements, and lead implementation across teams.
• Experience designing solutions across multiple business domains, including data ownership, integration boundaries, data modeling, and downstream dependencies.
• Strong understanding of data quality, metadata, lineage, security, automated testing, CI/CD, and Infrastructure as Code.
• Ability to collaborate directly with business stakeholders and software engineers, communicate architectural tradeoffs, and influence technical decisions without direct authority.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with SQL Server, PostgreSQL, change data capture (CDC), or event-driven architectures.
• Experience with data catalogs, data contracts, semantic layers, or data observability.
• Experience modernizing legacy data architectures or implementing domain-oriented data architectures.
• Experience applying AI-assisted tools to data engineering workflows.
• Experience in financial services or other regulated industries.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate the existing data architecture, identify gaps and improvement opportunities, and propose solutions with tradeoffs, costs, and implementation plans.
• Provide architectural guidance and design reviews across projects, ensuring consistent engineering principles and consideration of upstream dependencies and downstream consumers.
• Partner with business stakeholders and Software Engineering to understand business processes, data domains, ownership boundaries, and integration requirements, and translate these into data models and architectural solutions.
• Lead the design and hands-on implementation of complex data pipelines, integration patterns, data models, and orchestration frameworks across Snowflake, AWS, and Airflow.
• Design and implement reusable practices for automated data quality, testing, metadata, lineage, data access, and security.
• Identify and lead improvements in performance, cost, observability, CI/CD, deployment automation, and operational reliability.
• Drive technical initiatives from proposal through implementation, build alignment across teams, mentor engineers, and establish reusable engineering standards.

Benefits

• Flexible Paid Time Off Program.
• Medical, dental, vision, life insurance, disability, and other voluntary coverages, starting on day one.
• Eligibility to participate in the 401k program beginning on the first of the month following 30 days of employment, with a company match.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal