Principal Data Engineer/ Technical Lead

Unqork empowers enterprises to accelerate growth by rapidly building, testing, and running applications that are designed to be AI-native. The Principal Data Engineer/Technical Lead will design and build services and middleware for high-performance database operations while mentoring a team of engineers.

Responsibilities:

• Act as a player-coach, providing technical direction, architectural guidance, and daily mentorship to a focused team of 3–5 engineers. Conduct thoughtful code reviews and foster professional growth within your squad
• Design and implement sophisticated Data Access Layers (DAL) and custom ODMs to translate platform-generated, SQL-like queries into high-performance MongoDB BSON operations and aggregation pipelines
• Build and maintain middleware that ensures Unqork’s core business logic remains storage-agnostic, enabling seamless modularity and flexibility across different data storage mechanisms
• Architect and scale a multi-tenant, secure MongoDB ecosystem. Lead strategies for ensure high availability while performing deep-dive execution plan analysis (IXSCAN vs. COLLSCAN) to optimize query performance
• Plan and architect hybrid data architectures to support operation, transactional and analytical schema and database systems
• Use Node.js and JavaScript to build robust microservices (typically GraphQL) and internal libraries that integrate dynamic, metadata-driven data patterns into the Unqork no-code runtime
• Design schemas and declarative models that allow non-technical users to build complex application logic without compromising data integrity or system performance
• Architect real-time and batch data pipelines using Apache Kafka and Spark to facilitate data transformation and movement between relational and NoSQL systems
• Partner with Platform and Backend engineers to standardize data interaction patterns, ensuring high-scale, API-driven performance across the entire enterprise cloud
• Partner closely with the Product Management team to influence the product roadmap, translate business requirements into technical specifications, and ensure alignment between product goals and engineering execution

Requirements:

• • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science/ Master's or above preferred
• • 10+ Years of experience in backend, data, or platform engineering, with a proven track record of solving complex latency and implementation challenges for systems supporting millions of users
• • 2+ Years of experience in a Technical Lead or Player-Coach capacity, with demonstrated success managing, mentoring, and steering a small team of engineers while remaining hands-on in the codebase
• • Deep, hands-on proficiency with SQL database systems (PostGress), search systems (e.g. Elastic) AND with MongoDB/Atlas, including complex aggregation pipelines, BSON data modeling, sharding, replica sets, and advanced query performance tuning
• • Strong experience building Data Access Layers (DAL), custom ODMs, or query translation engines that successfully decouple application logic from underlying storage systems
• • High proficiency in Node.js or other major backend languages (Python, Java, or Go) to build high-scale, event-driven architectures
• • Direct experience implementing Redis (caching/TTL strategies) and Atlas Search (Lucene) to optimize data retrieval and discovery
• • Advanced knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and distributed systems, including experience with containerization (Docker/Kubernetes)
• • Familiarity with SQL-to-NoSQL translation patterns and a background in building internal developer platforms or metadata-driven systems (e.g., no-code/low-code)
• • An AI-forward mindset: You are an avid user of AI tools and are passionate about exploring how AI can automate workflows, enhance creativity, and increase your personal impact