Principal Data Engineer

Attain Finance is seeking a hands-on technical leader to shape and improve its data architecture and engineering practices. The Principal Data Engineer will modernize the data platform, lead complex data engineering initiatives, and improve data quality, reliability, security, and engineering efficiency across teams.

Responsibilities:

• Architecture and technical direction: Proactively evaluate the existing data architecture, identify gaps and improvement opportunities, and propose solutions with clear tradeoffs, costs, and implementation plans
• Solution architecture: Provide architectural guidance and design reviews across projects, ensuring solutions follow consistent engineering principles and account for upstream dependencies and downstream consumers
• Business and domain architecture: Partner with business stakeholders and Software Engineering to understand business processes, data domains, ownership boundaries, and integration requirements. Translate these into appropriate data models and architectural solutions
• Data engineering: Lead the design and hands-on implementation of complex data pipelines, integration patterns, data models, and orchestration frameworks across Snowflake, AWS, and Airflow
• Data quality and governance: Design and implement reusable practices for automated data quality, testing, metadata, lineage, data access, and security
• Platform reliability and efficiency: Identify and lead improvements in performance, cost, observability, CI/CD, deployment automation, and operational reliability
• Technical leadership: Drive technical initiatives from proposal through implementation, build alignment across teams, mentor engineers, and establish reusable engineering standards

Requirements:

• Strong understanding of data quality, metadata, lineage, security, automated testing, CI/CD, and Infrastructure as Code
• Ability to collaborate directly with business stakeholders and software engineers, communicate architectural tradeoffs, and influence technical decisions without direct authority
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 8+ years of experience in data engineering, data architecture, or data platform development, including technical leadership of complex production systems
• Advanced hands-on experience with Snowflake, SQL, Python, and Apache Airflow, including data modeling, pipeline development, performance optimization, and troubleshooting
• Experience designing data integration and cloud-based data architectures, including AWS services
• Demonstrated experience independently identifying architectural problems, evaluating alternatives, proposing improvements, and leading implementation across teams
• Experience designing solutions across multiple business domains, including data ownership, integration boundaries, data modeling, and downstream dependencies
• Experience with SQL Server, PostgreSQL, change data capture (CDC), or event-driven architectures
• Experience with data catalogs, data contracts, semantic layers, or data observability
• Experience modernizing legacy data architectures or implementing domain-oriented data architectures
• Experience applying AI-assisted tools to data engineering workflows
• Experience in financial services or other regulated industries