Principal Data Engineer

The Daily Wire, LLC; Nashville (TN); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Daily Wire seeks a Principal Data Engineer to architect and build systems connecting subscribers, content, advertising, and digital products. This hands-on role spans backend services, event-driven pipelines, cloud infrastructure, analytical models, and personalization systems to strengthen data foundations and support AI‑driven content discovery.

You will lead the design and implementation of distributed systems, real-time data pipelines, Snowflake data warehouses, and dbt models, and partner

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years in software/data engineering or data-intensive platforms.
• Advanced Snowflake and dbt expertise with cost governance.
• Experience building platforms on AWS (SageMaker and Personalize).
• IaC, CI/CD, observability, and production operations experience.
• Experience with streaming/messaging tech (Kafka, AWS Kinesis, etc.).
• Experience ML pipelines and content personalization.
• Strong problem-solving and cross-functional collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Architect and drive the long-term vision for the data ecosystem.
• Lead design and implementation of distributed systems and real-time pipelines.
• Build production-grade backend services and data workflows.
• Scale Snowflake warehouses and dbt models for reliable data products.
• Partner with product/analytics to define event schemas and semantic layers.
• Operate ML infrastructure and low-latency inference for content discovery.
• Establish standards for testing, observability, security, and cost efficiency.
• Provide technical leadership across AWS cloud infrastructure and incident response.

Skills

Software engineering

Data engineering

System design

Cross-functional leadership

Problem solving

Education

Bachelor’s degree in CS or related field

Tools

Snowflake

dbt

AWS

SageMaker

Kinesis / Kafka

Job description

The Daily Wire is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to architect and build the systems connecting our subscribers, content, advertising, and digital products. This hands-on role will work across backend services, event-driven pipelines, cloud infrastructure, analytical models, and personalization systems to strengthen our data foundations and support AI-driven content discovery. The ideal candidate brings a strong software engineering background, deep expertise in data-intensive systems, and the ability to influence technical strategy across infrastructure, analytics, and product-facing platforms.

Primary Responsibilities

• Architect and drive the long-term vision for Daily Wire's enterprise data ecosystem, including infrastructure, ingestion, storage, transformation, and real-time analytics.
• Lead the design and implementation of distributed systems, high-availability APIs, event streams, and real-time data pipelines.
• Build resilient, production-grade backend services and data workflows using Python or Go and advanced SQL.
• Design and scale Snowflake data warehouses and layered dbt models that transform complex operational data into reliable data products.
• Partner with product and analytics leaders to establish event schemas, tracking standards, and unified semantic layers.
• Architect and operate production machine-learning infrastructure, low-latency inference systems, and feedback loops that power content discovery and personalization.
• Establish architectural and operational standards for testing, observability, security, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Provide technical leadership across AWS cloud infrastructure, containerized services, architecture reviews, code mentorship, and incident response.

Experience & Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, analytics infrastructure, or data-intensive platform development.
• Advanced experience with Snowflake and dbt, including warehouse design, transformation architecture, testing, documentation, data lineage, query optimization, and cost governance.
• Proven experience building and operating enterprise-grade platforms on AWS, including SageMaker and Personalize.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, system observability, and production operations.
• Experience with streaming and messaging technologies such as Kafka, Segment, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis Data Firehose, or Apache Flink.
• Experience building pipelines that support machine-learning model training, serving, recommendation systems, and content personalization.
• Knowledge of event-time processing, windowing, checkpointing, and schema evolution.
• Experience creating analytics and reporting solutions using visualization tools such as Tableau.
• Experience with subscription media, streaming video, content discovery, payments, digital advertising, or high-growth consumer products is preferred.
• Exceptional problem-solving, debugging, written communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

To learn more about Daily Wire, please visit the following Daily Wire Facebook and YouTube page links:

Daily Wire

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Daily Wire provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.

Please Note: Daily Wire participates in E-Verify and performs background checks on all new hires. We will provide the Social Security Administration (SSA) and if necessary, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with information from each new employee's form I-9 to confirm work authorization. Thank you!

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