Principal Data Engineer

Location: Long Beach, California, or Denver, Colorado, United States. Hybrid work environment with an expectation of at least 3 days per week in the office; onsite requirements may increase when working on classified systems.

Base salary: $200,000–$280,000 in Denver or $210,000–$290,000 in Long Beach, plus equity and benefits.

Company

hirify.global builds autonomous spacecraft, advanced payloads, mission software, and space-based interceptors for space superiority and security.

What you will do

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable data pipelines and data products supporting batch, streaming, analytics, and AI/ML workloads.
• Build and optimize ELT/ETL processes and data models on modern cloud data platforms.
• Establish engineering practices for data quality, testing, monitoring, observability, CI/CD, version control, security, and production reliability.
• Own data engineering projects from technical design and development through deployment, production support, troubleshooting, and continuous improvement.
• Collaborate with engineering, AI/ML, analytics, product, and business teams to create reliable data solutions.
• Provide technical leadership through code reviews, reusable frameworks, documentation, knowledge sharing, AI-assisted engineering, and mentoring.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in data engineering and software engineering.
• Strong hands-on experience with Python and SQL.
• At least 3 years of experience with Snowflake, Databricks, or both.
• Strong understanding of data engineering, data architecture, data modeling, and ELT/ETL.
• Strong software engineering practices, including Git, testing, CI/CD, and code reviews.
• Must work from Long Beach, CA, or Denver, CO, with at least 3 days per week onsite; must meet U.S. ITAR eligibility requirements.

Nice to have

• Experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Experience with Airflow, dbt, Kafka, or similar technologies.
• Experience building lakehouse architectures.
• Experience with data governance, lineage, and observability.

Culture & Benefits

• Hands-on technical leadership with opportunities to influence data engineering practices across the company.
• Equity and health, dental, vision, HRA/HSA benefits.
• Paid time off, paid holidays, 401(k), and parental leave.