Principal Data Engineer

Lever, Inc.; Nashville (TN); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

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

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software or data engineering roles.
• Advanced Snowflake and dbt expertise with data warehouse design.
• Experience deploying on AWS including SageMaker and Personalize.
• Hands-on IaC, CI/CD, observability, and production ops.

Responsibilities

• Architect and drive the long-term data ecosystem vision.
• Design distributed systems, real-time data pipelines, and APIs.
• Lead production ML infra and low-latency inference.
• Mentor teams and enforce testing, security, and cost controls.
• Collaborate with product and analytics to define schemas and analytics.

Skills

Data engineering

Python/Go

SQL

Cloud architecture

Cross-functional collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering or equivalent

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.

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