Demo

Principal Data Platform Engineer

Motive
San Francisco, CA Full Time
POSTED ON 12/5/2025 CLOSED ON 1/7/2026

What are the responsibilities and job description for the Principal Data Platform Engineer position at Motive?

Who We Are

Motive empowers the people who run physical operations with tools to make their work safer, more productive, and more profitable. For the first time ever, safety, operations and finance teams can manage their drivers, vehicles, equipment, and fleet related spend in a single system. Combined with industry leading AI, the Motive platform gives you complete visibility and control, and significantly reduces manual workloads by automating and simplifying tasks.

Motive serves nearly 100,000 customers – from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses – across a wide range of industries, including transportation and logistics, construction, energy, field service, manufacturing, agriculture, food and beverage, retail, and the public sector.

Visit gomotive.com to learn more.

About The Job

As a Principal Data Platform Engineer, you will be involved and responsible for full ownership and driving key data platform initiatives and life cycle of the data management including data ingestion, data processing, data storage, querying system, cost reduction efforts towards delivering product features to internal and external Motive customers.

We are looking for a technical leader in the Data Platform area who has built the full data ingestion, transformation and analytics systems over AWS and Kubernetes in multiple companies. This individual would have faced and solved multiple challenges affecting many feature areas during this process using the best practices. This individual will be responsible for contributing significantly to drive the Motive’s Data Platform vision.

The Data Platform team works in three areas: 1. Build scalable systems and services for data ingestion, access, processing and query to enable data driven product features. 2. Collaborate and work closely with the various stakeholders and our backend product teams to improve and add features to the platform.

What You’ll Do

  • Work with other leaders in the Platform area to define and plan out the long term strategy for Data Platform.
  • Design and develop scalable distributed systems and frameworks for data management
  • Focus on addressing fault-tolerance and high availability issues, and work on scaling ingestion pipelines, improving and adding features to ETL framework while maintaining SLAs on performance, reliability, and system availability.
  • Collaborate with engineers across teams to identify and deliver cross-functional features
  • Participate in all aspects of the software development life cycle, from design to implementation and delivery.

What We’re Looking For

  • 8 years Hands-on software engineering experience
  • Backend programming skills including multi-threading, concurrency, etc and proficient in one or more of Python
  • Strong CS fundamentals including data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems
  • Experience in designing, implementing, and operating highly scalable software systems and services
  • Experience building systems using technologies like Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Airflow, Kubernetes
  • Excellent troubleshooting skills and track record of implementing creative solutions
  • Hands on experience with containerized platforms like Docker and Kubernetes
  • BS in Computer Science or a related field; Masters preferred
  • Excellent verbal and written skills. You collaborate effectively with other teams and communicate clearly about your work.

Pay Transparency

Your compensation may be based on several factors, including education, work experience, and certifications. For certain roles, total compensation may include restricted stock units. Motive offers benefits including health, pharmacy, optical and dental care benefits, paid time off, sick time off, short term and long term disability coverage, life insurance as well as 401k contribution (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). Learn more about our benefits by visiting
Motive Perks & Benefits

The Base Compensation Range For This Role Is

$148,000—$205,000 USD

Creating a diverse and inclusive workplace is one of Motive's core values. We are an equal opportunity employer and welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives.

Please review our Candidate Privacy Notice here.

UK Candidate Privacy Notice here.

The applicant must be authorized to receive and access those commodities and technologies controlled under U.S. Export Administration Regulations. It is Motive's policy to require that employees be authorized to receive access to Motive products and technology.

Salary : $148,000 - $205,000

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