Principal Data Engineer - Governance & Compliance

Vibe.co is reimagining how brands reach audiences in the age of streaming. The Principal Data Engineer will operate as a subject-matter expert within the Engineering organization, focusing on data governance and compliance to ensure Vibe's data assets are safe, understood, and scalable.

Responsibilities:

• Build a clear understanding of Vibe’s key data flows, sources of truth, and ownership
• Help define schemas, data contracts, documentation, and standards for how data should be used across the company
• Improve data discoverability so teams can confidently understand what data exists, where it lives, and how to use it
• Establish practical standards around data quality, lineage, observability, and ownership
• Define, maintain and enforce data lifecycle policies
• Help teams track data cost and usage
• Define and implement data compliance practices aligned with Vibe’s business, partners, and regulatory needs
• Partner with Legal, Product, Security, and Engineering to assess the impact of new data sources, partnerships, and use cases
• Help clarify what data can be used, how it can be used, where it should live, and how long it should be retained
• Support Vibe’s ability to work confidently with premium publishers, enterprise advertisers, and strategic partners
• Build guardrails, not gatekeepers, enabling engineers and teams to move fast while making safe, compliant decisions
• Embed governance and compliance into existing engineering workflows, tools, and architectural decisions
• Help Vibe transition toward a more security, and compliance-aware, data culture
• Identify the biggest risks, gaps, and opportunities, then define a pragmatic roadmap to address them

Requirements:

• Hands-on experience building or operating large-scale data platforms
• Strong practical experience with data governance, data quality, data contracts, lineage, access control, or compliance-oriented data architecture
• A proven track record implementing compliance frameworks in real engineering systems
• Experience working with sensitive, regulated, or contractually constrained data
• Ability to translate legal, compliance, security, and business requirements into practical engineering solutions
• Strong stakeholder management skills across Engineering, Product, Legal, Security, and Analytics
• Ability to operate as a senior individual contributor with high ownership and strong influence
• Comfort with ambiguity, early-stage environments, and building structure where it does not yet exist
• Based in Europe, or able to work closely with European engineering teams
• Experience with adtech, connected TV, streaming TV, publisher data, or measurement platforms
• Experience with identity resolution, device graphs, clean rooms, or privacy-safe data matching
• Familiarity with GDPR, CCPA, SOC2, or similar compliance frameworks
• Experience with modern data tooling such as Airflow, Dagster, dbt, Kafka, S3, Athena, Snowflake, BigQuery, or similar
• Experience with data catalogs, lineage tooling, policy-as-code, access governance, or data observability platforms
• Familiarity with ML data workflows, feature stores, model training data, or permitted use of data for ML systems