Worth AI, a leader in the computer software industry, is looking for a talented and experienced Principal Data Engineer to join their innovative team. At Worth AI, we are on a mission to revolutionize decision-making with the power of artificial intelligence while fostering an environment of collaboration, and adaptability, aiming to make a meaningful impact in the tech landscape.. Our team values include extreme ownership, one team and creating reaving fans both for our employees and customers.
Worth is looking for a Principal Data Engineer to own the company-wide data architecture and platform. Design and scale reliable batch/streaming pipelines, institute data quality and governance, and enable analytics/ML with secure, cost-efficient systems. Partner with engineering, product, analytics, and security to turn business needs into durable data products.
Responsibilities
What you will do:
- Architecture & Strategy
- Define end-to-end data architecture (lake/lakehouse/warehouse, batch/streaming, CDC, metadata).
- Set standards for schemas, contracts, orchestration, storage layers, and semantic/metrics models.
- Publish roadmaps, ADRs/RFCs, and “north star” target states; guide build vs. buy decisions.
- Platform & Pipelines
- Design and build scalable, observable ELT/ETL and event pipelines.
- Establish ingestion patterns (CDC, file, API, message bus) and schema-evolution policies.
- Provide self-service tooling for analysts/scientists (dbt, notebooks, catalogs, feature stores).
- Ensure workflow reliability (idempotency, retries, backfills, SLAs).
- Data Quality & Governance
- Define dataset SLAs/SLOs, freshness, lineage, and data certification tiers.
- Enforce contracts and validation tests; deploy anomaly detection and incident runbooks.
- Partner with governance on cataloging, PII handling, retention, and access policies.
- Reliability, Performance & Cost
- Lead capacity planning, partitioning/clustering, and query optimization.
- Introduce SRE-style practices for data (error budgets, postmortems).
- Drive FinOps for storage/compute; monitor and reduce cost per TB/query/job.
- Security & Compliance
- Implement encryption, tokenization, and row/column-level security; manage secrets and audits.
- Align with SOC 2 and privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR/CCPA; HIPAA if applicable).
- ML & Analytics Enablement
- Deliver versioned, documented datasets/features for BI and ML.
- Operationalize training/serving data flows, drift signals, and feature-store governance.
- Build and maintain the semantic layer and metrics consistency for experimentation/BI.
- Leadership & Collaboration
- Provide technical leadership across squads; mentor senior/staff engineers.
- Run design reviews and drive consensus on complex trade-offs.
- Translate business goals into data products with product/analytics leaders.
Requirements
- 10+ years in data engineering (including 3+ years as staff/principal or equivalent scope).
- Proven leadership of company-wide data architecture and platform initiatives.
- Deep experience with at least one cloud (AWS) and a modern warehouse or lakehouse (e.g., Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks).
- Strong SQL and one programming language (Python or Scala/Java).
- Orchestration (Airflow/Dagster/Prefect), transformations (dbt or equivalent), and streaming (Kafka/Kinesis/PubSub).
- Data modeling (3NF, star, data vault) and semantic/metrics layers.
- Data quality testing, lineage, and observability in production environments.
- Security best practices: RBAC/ABAC, encryption, key management, auditability.
Nice to Have
- Feature stores and ML data ops; experimentation frameworks.
- Cost optimization at scale; multi-tenant architectures.
- Governance tools (DataHub/Collibra/Alation), OpenLineage, and testing frameworks (Great Expectations/Deequ).
- Compliance exposure (SOC 2, GDPR/CCPA; HIPAA/PCI where relevant).
- Model features sourced from complex 3rd-party data (KYB/KYC, credit bureaus, fraud detection APIs)
Benefits
- Health Care Plan (Medical, Dental & Vision)
- Retirement Plan (401k, IRA)
- Life Insurance
- Unlimited Paid Time Off
- 9 paid Holidays
- Family Leave
- Work From Home
- Free Food & Snacks (Access to Industrious Co-working Membership!)
- Wellness Resources
