Principal Data Engineer

Serv Recruitment Agency

Principal Data Engineer

Remote,
Full Time
Paid
  • Responsibilities

    Serv, a global executive recruitment partner, is hiring on behalf of our client Virtual Intros for a Principal Data Engineer.

    Join the Team:

    Virtual Intros is building the intelligence layer for meaningful, privacy-first connection across people, companies, and communities, turning real-time engagement into measurable business value. The platform is supported by modern architecture including microservices, Infrastructure as Code, and distributed systems, and is now evolving to include a secure, multi-tenant data foundation that powers analytics, reporting, and AI-enabled capabilities at enterprise scale.

    To learn more please visit: Not provided

    Position Responsibilities:

    This role owns the design and delivery of the company's data platform, setting architectural direction while remaining hands-on in building the systems that power analytics, reporting, and AI capabilities. You will define data standards, ensure tenant-safe design, and build a scalable, trustworthy data foundation used across the business.

    This role includes:

    • Define and own the foundational data architecture including data models, relationships, and source-of-truth systems
    • Establish data contracts and guide the evolution from operational data to analytical and AI-ready systems
    • Design and build end-to-end data pipelines from ingestion through serving layers
    • Implement scalable ingestion from relational databases, object storage, event streams, and SaaS APIs
    • Own transformation layer architecture including modeling, testing, documentation, and CI/CD integration
    • Establish data quality, observability, schema management, and pipeline reliability standards
    • Design multi-tenant data models, storage layouts, and access patterns
    • Implement tenant-aware security including row-level and column-level controls
    • Define data lifecycle management including retention, archival, and deletion strategies
    • Establish data governance standards including classification, lineage, cataloging, and auditability
    • Partner with security and compliance teams to ensure privacy and regulatory alignment
    • Design serving layers for analytics, reporting, and internal business use
    • Prepare data systems to support AI-enabled capabilities including embeddings and advanced data structures
    • Evaluate and implement graph-based data models where appropriate
    • Mentor engineers and provide architectural oversight across internal and external contributors
    • Lead vendor evaluation and manage external data partners to ensure alignment with standards
    • Drive data literacy and data-informed decision making across the organization

    Qualifications

    • 10+ years of experience in data engineering with principal-level ownership
    • Proven experience owning foundational data architecture in production environments
    • Strong experience with modern data pipelines across batch and streaming systems
    • Deep expertise in data modeling for both operational and analytical use cases
    • Proven experience designing multi-tenant data systems and isolation strategies
    • Strong understanding of data governance, privacy, and sensitive data handling
    • Advanced SQL skills and experience with modern processing frameworks such as Spark, Flink, or equivalent
    • Experience with AWS data services including S3, Glue, Kinesis, RDS, or similar
    • Experience ingesting and modeling data from document-based systems such as MongoDB
    • Experience working with graph data models and graph databases such as Neo4j or Amazon Neptune
    • Experience with modern cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake or Redshift
    • Experience with data transformation tools such as dbt including testing and CI/CD
    • Experience building ingestion pipelines from CDC, object storage, and streaming systems
    • Experience managing or governing external data vendors and partners
    • Experience communicating data strategy and tradeoffs to executive stakeholders

    Preferred Experience

    • Experience supporting AI, machine learning, or embedding-based data use cases
    • Experience with data cataloging, lineage, and governance tools
    • Background in enterprise or regulated data environments
    • Experience with real-time and event-driven data architectures
    • Experience in high-growth or startup environments scaling toward enterprise

    Our Ideal Teammate Is Someone Who:

    • Is proactive and accountable
    • Thinks strategically and executes consistently
    • Communicates with clarity and confidence
    • Brings a positive, growth-oriented mindset
    • Is highly organized and dependable
    • Embraces learning and feedback
    • Cares deeply about doing great work

    Location: Remote