Principal Data Engineer

Job Description

We are seeking a highly experienced Principal Data Engineer / Senior Data Architect to lead the design, architecture, and scalability of modern data platforms. This role requires deep expertise in building enterprise-grade data ecosystems across cloud, real-time, batch, governance, and AI-ready infrastructure. You will own the end-to-end data architecture vision from ingestion and transformation to analytics, ML enablement, governance, and cost optimization.

Key Responsibilities

Data Architecture & Platform Design

Architect scalable data lakehouse and warehouse platforms

Define canonical data models and domain-driven data architecture

Design medallion (Bronze/Silver/Gold) architectures

Establish data standards, governance, and security frameworks

Evaluate and select cloud-native data tools

Engineering & Implementation Leadership

Build high-performance ETL/ELT pipelines (batch + streaming)

Architect real-time data pipelines using event-driven systems

Optimize large-scale distributed data processing systems

Implement CI/CD for data engineering workflows

Ensure reliability, scalability, and observability

Cloud & Modern Data Stack Expertise

Hands-on experience with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud

Strong expertise in Databricks, Snowflake, Apache Kafka, Airflow.

Analytics & AI Enablement

Design data platforms optimized for BI and AI workloads

Enable feature stores and ML-ready datasets

Support GenAI and advanced analytics use cases

Ensure high data quality and lineage tracking

Governance, Security & Cost Optimization

Implement RBAC, encryption, and data masking

Design cost-aware architectures

Monitor usage and optimize cloud spend

Define data SLAs and reliability frameworks.

Leadership & Strategy

Lead and mentor data engineering teams

Conduct architecture reviews

Partner with product, AI, and business teams

Define long-term data strategy and roadmap

Drive technical excellence and coding standards.

Required Qualifications

8+ years of experience in data engineering / data architecture

Proven experience designing large-scale data platforms

Deep expertise in distributed systems

Strong SQL and Python/Scala skills

Experience handling TB-PB scale datasets

Strong understanding of data modeling (dimensional + data vault)

Experience with real-time and streaming architecture

Experience leading technical teams.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience in FinTech, SaaS, or enterprise consulting

Experience building data engineering practice from scratch

Exposure to AI/ML infrastructure

Certifications in AWS/Azure/GCP

Experience with multi-cloud environments