Principal Data Engineer

Avalara

66d • $199,200 - $410,100

About The Position

We're looking for a Principal AI Data Engineer/Architect to lead the design of our next-generation data and AI platform. Our team ingests petabytes of data across 20+ high-volume, complex SaaS products in finance and e-commerce. We build ETLs, domain-oriented transformations, dbt models and metric definitions, and data quality measures that power customer-facing reporting for financial and tax compliance, plus traffic, growth, and product analytics. You'll be the technical north star for scalable pipelines into Snowflake, semantic and physical data models, and the AI systems that keep them healthy while reporting to the VP, Data Engineering. You've built AI agents that can automatically maintain data quality, assist with semantic model creation, and accelerate data operations. You're equally comfortable reviewing a DBT PR, tuning a Snowflake workload, designing a domain data contract, or selecting the right LLM strategy (fine-tuning vs. retrieval-augmented) for a tax/financial use case.

Requirements

• 10+ years in data engineering/architecture with hands-on Snowflake and dbt at high scale; deep SQL expertise and Python.
• Experience shipping AI/LLM systems in production, including building agents for data ops/quality and selecting the right patterns (RAG, fine-tuning, PEFT, prompt strategies).
• Track record building domain-oriented semantic layers and metric stores that serve both external customers (financial/tax compliance reporting) and internal analytics at scale.
• Mastery of data quality and observability (tests, profiling, anomaly detection, lineage, SLAs/SLOs) and integrating these into CI/CD and orchestration.
• Background in distributed data processing and streaming (e.g., Spark, Flink, Kafka/Kinesis) and modern orchestrators (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect).
• Experience with ML/MLOps for data quality and data operations (model lifecycle, evaluation, monitoring, drift, and governance).
• Practical knowledge of security, privacy, and compliance for financial/tax data (e.g., SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR/CCPA concepts, data masking/row access, management).

Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end data/AI architecture for petabyte-scale ingestion, transformation, modeling, and serving across 20+ SaaS products, with Snowflake as the analytical backbone.
• Shape the semantic layer and metrics platform (DBT models, tests, macros, and domain-specific metric definitions) to support customer-facing compliance reporting and internal analytics (traffic, growth, product).
• Build AI agents for data operations that detect, explain, and fix data quality issues; auto-generate/maintain DBT models and documentation; and suggest/validate domain semantic mappings.
• Design data quality at scale using a blend of rules, statistics, and ML (e.g., anomaly detection, drift, outlier scoring), with lineage and observability integrated into orchestration and CI/CD.
• Lead LLM data preparation across financial and tax domains: curate high-quality training corpora, implement secure data pipelines for fine-tuning and retrieval, and enforce governance for PII/tax data.
• Establish domain-driven standards (data contracts, ownership, SLAs/SLOs, data products) and coach teams on best practices for DBT, testing, documentation, and review.
• Optimize for performance and cost (Snowflake compute patterns, clustering/partitioning, caching/materialization strategies) to meet strict latency and concurrency needs.
• Partner with product, compliance, and engineering to translate reporting and regulatory requirements into durable, auditable data models and APIs.
• Mentor senior engineers through design reviews, pairing, and technical roadmap leadership; improve for code quality, testing, and.
• Be able to understand complex data patterns, understand how to convert signals generated from hundreds of data science & data engineering models into executive data stories. Have the to present data stories and stand up to difficult questions.
• Guide platform reliability with orchestration, incident response, lineage/impact analysis, and progressive delivery (feature flags, canaries, backfills).

Benefits

• Total Rewards including a great compensation package, paid time off, and paid parental leave.
• Health & Wellness benefits including private medical, life, and disability insurance.
• Inclusive culture and diversity initiatives with employee-run resource groups and senior leadership sponsorship.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees