Principal Data Engineer (AI)

Location: United States; hybrid or remote

Base salary: $160,000–$260,000 per year, plus potential incentive compensation and benefits.

Company

hirify.global builds technology for insurance professionals and has operated for more than 40 years.

What you will do

• Define large-scale data architecture across batch and streaming platforms, warehouses, and lakehouses, evaluating quality, scalability, and sustainability tradeoffs.
• Architect observability, alerting, incident response, pipeline health monitoring, and SLAs/SLOs for critical data assets.
• Establish standards for data quality, lineage, access control, cataloging, governance, and data modeling across OLAP, OLTP, streaming, AI, vector-store, and feature-store use cases.
• Define and govern AI-enabled and agent-supported workflows with appropriate guardrails, and enable adoption across the data engineering lifecycle.
• Set engineering standards and design patterns, resolve complex architecture issues, and influence cross-functional roadmaps.
• Mentor and grow engineers through code reviews, design discussions, hands-on guidance, and teaching by doing.

Requirements

• 15+ years in software engineering, data engineering, or architecture with outstanding impact.
• Degree in Computer Science or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Expert knowledge of data architecture principles and best practices, with hands-on experience coding, testing, and validating architecture at scale.
• Experience architecting large-scale data warehouses or lakehouses and strong understanding of data modeling, including dimensional modeling and streaming architectures.
• Strong understanding of data governance; experience with data catalogs is a plus.
• Expertise across data and software technologies; GCP BigQuery and dbt experience is a plus.
• Proven ability to influence without authority, communicate complex problems clearly, and work effectively with different audiences.
• Pragmatic, waste-eliminating approach; player-coach mindset; adaptability, resilience, and ability to thrive in ambiguity and iteration.

Nice to have

• Experience with GCP BigQuery, dbt, vector stores, or data catalogs.

Culture & Benefits

• People-first culture focused on trust, inclusion, collaboration, and growth.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage.
• Holiday and vacation time, plus health and wellness days.
• Additional bonus day for the employee’s birthday.
• Eligible employees may participate in annual bonus or commission programs.