Principal Data Engineer

About the Role

We are looking for a Principal Data Engineer who thrives on solving the most complex data problems, and enjoys working cross-functionally with product, engineering and analytics teams to deliver trusted, high-impact data solutions. The ideal candidate is excited to take strategic ownership of complex data challenges and help evolve our data platform to the next stage of scale and maturity, driving architectural vision and execution.

The Data & Analytics organization at DriveWealth powers the company's data ecosystem end-to-end. Within it, the Data Platform Engineering team owns two critical pillars:

• Data Ingestion - building reliable pipelines that bring data from diverse internal and external sources
• Semantic Data Layer - creating curated, consistent and reliable datasets that enable analytics, reporting and decision making

What You'll Do

• Define the architectural vision and strategy for our data ecosystem, ensuring scalability, reliability, and security.
• Design, build and maintain mission-critical robust data pipelines (batch, streaming and replication) that power analytics, reporting and compliance use-cases.
• Translate business needs into comprehensive data solutions, acting as a technical leader partnering with product managers, engineering teams and business stakeholders.
• Proactively identify major architectural challenges and opportunities, anticipate scaling, performance and quality needs before they become blockers.
• Establish and champion company-wide best practices, including documentation, code reviews and standards for data modelling, orchestration and tooling.
• Mentor and coach other engineers, raising the bar for data engineering craft and helping grow team and organizational capabilities.
• Contribute to self-service data products, enabling data consumers with curated datasets, semantic layers and tools that accelerate insight generation.
• Drive the full lifecycle of data platform modernization initiatives, from ideation to successful rollout.

What You'll Need

• 7+ years of professional experience in data engineering or related fields, with a proven track record of building and scaling data platforms and ecosystems from 0 to 1 and leading modernization efforts.
• Technical Skills:
• Proven ability to drive technical strategy, work independently, and lead complex projects cross-functionally with product, engineering and business teams.
• Experience working in teams with CI/CD pipelines, Git-based workflows and Agile methodologies
• Curiosity, accountability and a drive to improve data quality, scalability and usability across the company
• BS in Computer Science or equivalent

Special Knowledge (Nice to Have, But Not Required)

• Fintech or capital market experience
• Familiarity with regulatory and compliance-driven reporting (e.g. FINRA, GDPR)
• Previous experience as a Software Engineer (SWE)
• Exposure to and understanding of ML and AI data pipelines and MLOps
• Experience mentoring other engineers or leading a small team