Principal Data Engineer

Equal Opportunity Ventures; Vancouver; Hybrid; CAD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first

Flexible time off

Medical & dental plans

Parental leave

Employee stock options

Job summary

JobGet is seeking a Principal Data Engineer in Vancouver, BC to lead data platform architecture, real-time pipelines, and AI-driven product experiences. You will own the data stack, mentor engineers, and drive cross-team initiatives spanning analytics, product, and software engineering.

Ideal candidates have 10+ years in data engineering, deep Snowflake/dbt, Python, SQL, and AWS experience, plus a track record building scalable data systems for ML/AI.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of data engineering experience, including startup-scale ownership at principal or staff IC level.

Responsibilities

• Lead data platform architecture decisions for scalability, reliability, and time-to-insight.

Skills

Snowflake

dbt

Python

SQL

AWS

Data modeling

Real-time streaming

Data governance

AI usage

Tools

Snowflake

dbt

KSQL

Apache Flink

Job description

About JobGet

As the #1 app focused on everyday workers, JobGet is redefining the future of hiring. Founded in 2019, JobGet began as the only mobile-first hiring platform for everyday workers. Since then, we’ve grown by joining forces with Snagajob, the largest hourly job board in the U.S., followed by Seasoned, the leading platform for restaurant hiring. Each acquisition has brought JobGet closer to the frontline, making the platform faster, smarter, and more effective.

Principal Data Engineer
JobGet
Data Science
Vancouver, BC, Canada
Posted on Aug 3, 2026

Who We Are

We’ve designed our values to be more than just buzzwords; they’re things we can do. We hope that our culture reflects our values by our commitment to living them every day.

Make a difference every day

• Teamwork - We make time to help colleagues across JobGet succeed.
• Excellence - We set ambitious targets, put in extraordinary effort, and persevere until we have accomplished — or exceeded — our goals.
• Innovation - We’re a team of creative, outside-the-box thinkers who thrive in a continuously evolving environment. To us, innovation is about questioning the status quo and always striving to do things better.

Have Unwavering grit

• Resilience - By remaining resilient and adaptable, we grow stronger as individuals and as an organization.
• Accountability - We operate with an ownership mentality where everyone feels a sense of responsibility to make us better and always act in the best interest of JobGet.
• Speed - We make decisions fast and execute them even faster. Bias for speed is one of our core strengths and a key advantage over our competitors.

Grow through curiosity & kindness

• Respect - We treat each other with mutual respect, kindness, and celebrate our differences.
• Learning - We ask questions and seek to understand by being genuinely curious & communicative.
• Culture - We believe that each of us is responsible for our culture. It requires self-discipline and the drive to contribute to something greater than ourselves.

What You’ll Do

As our Principal Data Engineer, you will help lead the technical direction for how data flows, scales, and powers every decision at JobGet. You’ll own the data architecture behind our platform that connects hundreds of millions of job seekers with employers across dozens of industries; and you’ll do it at the intersection of high-throughput pipelines, real-time matching signals, and AI-driven product experiences.

Data Platform Architecture & Strategy

• Drive Architectural Decisions: Lead design reviews for critical platform components, evaluating trade-offs across scalability, cost, reliability, and time-to-insight.
• Champion Modern Data Stack Adoption: Evaluate and introduce best-in-class tooling (Databricks, Snowflake, dbt, Kafka, etc.) aligned with engineering principles and business needs.
• Ensure Platform Reliability: Own the observability, alerting, and operational readiness standards for tier-1 pipelines, including runbooks, failover strategies, and reprocessing protocols.
• Autonomy & Decision Making: Demonstrate high resourcefulness; you are empowered to make significant technical decisions and drive projects end-to-end with limited oversight.

Data Modeling & Pipeline Engineering

• Build Production-Grade Pipelines: Design and implement robust batch data pipelines using Snowflake and dbt as the core of JobGet’s transformation layer, ingesting and serving data across product telemetry, marketplace signals, employer activity, and candidate behavior.
• Lead Data Modeling Decisions: Establish data modeling standards (schema design, dimensional modeling, and data contracts) that serve analytics, ML feature engineering, and product instrumentation.
• Solve the Hardest Problems: Personally take on the most complex data integration, performance, and reliability challenges that require principal-level judgment and hands-on implementation.
• Support Real-Time & Near-Real-Time Needs: Architect and evolve streaming data infrastructure using technologies such as KSQL and Apache Flink to power real-time matching, recommendation, and product decisioning systems.

AI & Analytics Enablement

• Enable Machine Learning at Scale: Partner closely with Platform Engineers and Data Analysts to design feature stores, training data pipelines, and inference-ready datasets that power JobGet’s AI matching engine.
• Accelerate Analytics Delivery: Work with Data Analytics stakeholders to ensure data products are well-modeled, documented, and performant for self-serve consumption. Evaluate and integrate emerging AI-powered tools to enhance operational efficiency and developer productivity.

Data Governance, Quality & Security

• Establish Data Governance Standards: Define and enforce policies for data quality, lineage, access control, and cataloging that scale across a growing and multi-product organization.
• Protect Data Integrity: Implement data validation frameworks, SLA monitoring, and anomaly detection to maintain trustworthy data across all consumers.
• Ensure Compliance & Privacy: Design data systems with privacy-by-default principles, ensuring alignment with applicable regulations (CCPA, GDPR, etc.) across candidate and employer data.

Hands-On Execution & Technical Excellence

• Raise the Technical Bar: Mentor and level up engineers across the data team through code reviews and design guidance.
• Partner Across Engineering & Product: Collaborate with Software Engineering, Product, and Analytics to ensure data requirements are deeply understood at inception.
• Influence Without Authority: Drive adoption of data platform standards and architectural patterns across teams through clear communication, documentation, and trust-building.
• Proactive Problem Solving: Personally identify and execute fixes for deep-seeded bottlenecks, architectural bugs, and performance issues that impact system stability.

Who You Are

• 10+ years of data engineering experience, with at least 3–5 years operating at a principal or staff IC level in a start-up environment.
• Production-grade experience with Snowflake and dbt (required); you’ve designed, owned, and scaled these in a real product environment, not just used them.
• Experience with real-time streaming technologies such as KSQL or Apache Flink is strongly preferred; you’ve built or operated streaming pipelines in production.
• Hands-on AWS experience at scale, including cloud data architecture, cost governance, and infrastructure-as-code; Terraform experience is a nice-to-have.
• DataOps experience: familiarity with CI/CD for data pipelines, automated testing frameworks, and deployment practices that treat data infrastructure like production software.
• Significant, demonstrated AI usage in your day-to-day engineering work is required. You actively use AI tools (e.g. Claude, Copilot, Cursor, or similar) to move faster, reason through architecture, generate and review code, and solve novel problems. This isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s how we expect principal-level engineers to operate.
• Expert-level proficiency in Python and SQL, with strong command of distributed systems, data pipeline design, and performance optimization.
• Strong data modeling background: dimensional modeling, schema design, data contracts, and the ability to build structures that outlast the team member who built them.
• Experience building data infrastructure that directly supports ML/AI systems, including feature pipelines, training data management, and inference-layer data serving.
• Demonstrated track record of setting technical standards across teams, not just within your own scope: through RFCs, architecture reviews, or platform migrations.
• Strong grasp of data governance fundamentals (data lineage, cataloging, access control, and quality monitoring) with practical experience implementing them in production.
• Familiarity with real-time and near-real-time data architectures (streaming, event-driven design, CDC), especially in marketplace or two-sided platform contexts.
• Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills; you can translate complex data infrastructure trade-offs into plain language for product and business audiences.
• You have a builder’s mentality and an operator’s discipline. You move fast, ship with confidence, and hold yourself to a high bar even when no one is watching.

At JobGet, we’re looking for people who see themselves in our Values. If you have made a measurable impact in your career and are known for your grit and curiosity, we encourage you to apply. We look forward to hearing from you.

Benefits & Rewards

• Purpose-driven organization
• Flexible time off
• Remote-first
• Flexible work hours - our employees are in multiple time zones
• Medical & dental plans
• Parental leave
• Employee stock options