Principal Data Engineer

Orlando, FL | Remote | Full time

About our client

Worth AI, a leader in the computer software industry, is looking for a talented and experienced Principal Data Engineer to join its innovative team. Worth AI is on a mission to revolutionize decision-making with the power of artificial intelligence while fostering an environment of collaboration and adaptability, aiming to make a meaningful impact in the tech landscape. The team values include extreme ownership, one team, and creating raving fans both for employees and customers.

About the role

Worth AI is looking for a Principal Data Engineer to own the company-wide data architecture and platform. The individual will design and scale reliable batch/streaming pipelines, institute data quality and governance, and enable analytics/ML with secure, cost-efficient systems.

They will partner with engineering, product, analytics, and security to turn business needs into durable data products.

Responsibilities

What the individual will do:

• Architecture & Strategy
• Define end-to-end data architecture (lake/lakehouse/warehouse, batch/streaming, CDC, metadata).
• Set standards for schemas, contracts, orchestration, storage layers, and semantic/metrics models.
• Publish roadmaps, ADRs/RFCs, and “north star” target states; guide build vs. buy decisions.
• Platform & Pipelines
• Design and build scalable, observable ELT/ETL and event pipelines.
• Establish ingestion patterns (CDC, file, API, message bus) and schema-evolution policies.
• Provide self-service tooling for analysts/scientists (dbt, notebooks, catalogs, feature stores).
• Ensure workflow reliability (idempotency, retries, backfills, SLAs).
• Data Quality & Governance
• Define dataset SLAs/SLOs, freshness, lineage, and data certification tiers.
• Enforce contracts and validation tests; deploy anomaly detection and incident runbooks.
• Partner with governance on cataloging, PII handling, retention, and access policies.
• Reliability, Performance & Cost
• Lead capacity planning, partitioning/clustering, and query optimization.
• Introduce SRE-style practices for data (error budgets, postmortems).
• Drive FinOps for storage/compute; monitor and reduce cost per TB/query/job.
• Security & Compliance
• Implement encryption, tokenization, and row/column-level security; manage secrets and audits.
• Align with SOC 2 and privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR/CCPA; HIPAA if applicable).
• ML & Analytics Enablement
• Deliver versioned, documented datasets/features for BI and ML.
• Operationalize training/serving data flows, drift signals, and feature-store governance.
• Build and maintain the semantic layer and metrics consistency for experimentation/BI.
• Leadership & Collaboration
• Provide technical leadership across squads; mentor senior/staff engineers.
• Run design reviews and drive consensus on complex trade-offs.
• Translate business goals into data products with product/analytics leaders.

Requirements

• 10 years in data engineering (including 3 years as staff/principal or equivalent scope).
• Proven leadership of company-wide data architecture and platform initiatives.
• Deep experience with at least one cloud (AWS) and a modern warehouse or lakehouse (e.g., Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks).
• Strong SQL and one programming language (Python or Scala/Java).
• Orchestration (Airflow/Dagster/Prefect), transformations (dbt or equivalent), and streaming (Kafka/Kinesis/PubSub).
• Data modeling (3NF, star, data vault) and semantic/metrics layers.
• Data quality testing, lineage, and observability in production environments.
• Security best practices: RBAC/ABAC, encryption, key management, auditability.

Nice to Have:

• Feature stores and ML data ops; experimentation frameworks.
• Cost optimization at scale; multi-tenant architectures.
• Governance tools (DataHub/Collibra/Alation), OpenLineage, and testing frameworks (Great Expectations/Deequ).
• Compliance exposure (SOC 2, GDPR/CCPA; HIPAA/PCI where relevant).
• Model features sourced from complex 3rd-party data (KYB/KYC, credit bureaus, fraud detection APIs).

Benefits

• Health Care Plan (Medical, Dental & Vision)
• Retirement Plan (401k, IRA)
• Life Insurance
• Unlimited Paid Time Off
• 9 paid Holidays
• Family Leave
• Work From Home
• Free Food & Snacks (Access to Industrious Co-working Membership!)
• Wellness Resources
• Salary: US$150k - US$175k