Principal Data Engineer

TL;DR

Principal Data Engineer (Data Platform): Define and align the architectural vision for an org-wide data platform, owning high-stakes decisions across ingestion, orchestration, event streaming, and platform infrastructure with an accent on CDC streaming (Kafka → Flink → BigQuery), production readiness standards, and data quality/observability. Focus on building governed self-service analytics, incident response for platform outages, and establishing scalable engineering standards while mentoring senior and staff data engineers.

Location: US Remote

Salary: $220K–$260K (Offers Equity)

Company

hims & hers is a health and wellness platform redefining access to affordable, personalized care.

What you will do

• Own long-term data platform architecture across ingestion, orchestration, event streaming, and transformation/serving infrastructure, including CDC-based streaming decisions (Kafka → Flink → BigQuery).
• Lead cross-team architecture governance by chairing the Architecture Review Committee (ARC) and acting as the primary technical DRI for multi-system, cost-impacting changes.
• Define and enforce engineering standards for production readiness across DPE systems: testing, CI/CD patterns, observability-as-code, logging standards, data contracts, and Schema Registry governance.
• Design data quality and observability architecture, including dbt anomaly detection frameworks, schema validation, data drift alerting, and consumer trust standards.
• Set technical strategy for self-service analytics, including platform capabilities, guardrails to prevent downstream breakage, and reducing DPE bottlenecks over time.
• Drive platform governance and operations: evaluate and govern DPE tooling (e.g., Fivetran, Confluent), manage data sharing/egress patterns, lead P1/P2 incident response with blameless RCAs, and produce architecture artifacts (ADRs, RFCs, design docs).

Requirements

• 15+ years of professional experience designing, building, and owning data platform architecture at company scale.
• Deep expertise in cloud-native data platforms with GCP primary (BigQuery, GCS, Dataflow); AWS operational familiarity required (EKS-based Airflow). Multi-cloud fluency required.
• Hands-on experience with the modern data stack at platform scale: dbt governance, Airflow/Astronomer, Kafka/Confluent, Databricks/Spark, Fivetran, and data sharing/activation (Hightouch or equivalent).
• Experience designing and operating event streaming pipelines at scale, including Schema Registry, data contracts, and consumer lag management; strong CDC and Flink experience.
• Proven ability to establish engineering standards across multiple teams without direct authority.
• Regulated-environment governance experience (HIPAA/PHI handling, access controls, audit logging) and GDPR compliance; strong Python and SQL skills.

Culture & Benefits

• Unlimited PTO, company holidays, and quarterly mental health days.
• Comprehensive health benefits (medical, dental, vision) plus parental leave.
• Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP) and 401k with employer matching.
• Offsite team retreats and a flexible/remote work approach.

Hiring process

• Screening with a recruiter to align on role fit and a more targeted compensation range based on location and job-related factors.
• Interview process focused on architecture ownership, production readiness standards, and data platform leadership.