Principal Data Engineer

Hims; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary & equity

Unlimited PTO

Comprehensive health benefits

ESPP

401k with match

Offsite team retreats

Job summary

Hims & Hers is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to lead the Data Platform Engineering team. You will define and align the architectural vision for the data platform with business goals, partnering with product, engineering, and data science leadership.

Your scope is org-wide, setting standards and driving high-stakes architectural decisions for streaming and transformation. The role oversees a modern stack (GCP BigQuery, Airflow on Astronomer/EKS, Databricks, Delta Lake, Terraform) and will own

Qualifications

• 15+ years designing and owning data platform architecture at scale.
• Ability to align architectural vision with business goals across the org.
• Deep cloud-native data platform expertise across GCP (BigQuery, GCS, Dataflow) and AWS (EKS-based Airflow).
• Hands-on with modern data stack: dbt, Airflow, Kafka/Confluent, Databricks, Fivetran, and data sharing platforms.
• Experience with data governance, HIPAA/GDPR compliance, and regulated environments.
• Proven track record in incident response and cost governance for platforms.

Responsibilities

• Own long-term technical architecture for DPE, guiding ingestion, orchestration, streaming, and platform infra.
• Lead Architecture Review Committee decisions and be the primary technical DRI for cross-team changes.
• Set engineering standards, production readiness criteria, testing, CI/CD, observability, and data contracts.
• Own data quality, observability, schema validation, and data drift alerting across the platform.
• Define self-service analytics strategy and guardrails to reduce bottlenecks.
• Govern tooling like Fivetran, Confluent, and related contracts, costs, and deprecations.
• Manage data sharing patterns and governance for internal/external consumers.
• Drive cost governance: BigQuery slots, partitioning, and rightsizing.
• Lead incident responses for platform outages and drive systemic fixes.

Skills

Data architecture

Cloud data platforms

Python

SQL

Leadership

Cross-team collaboration

Terraform

dbt

Airflow

Kafka/Confluent

Tools

BigQuery

GCS

Dataflow

Astronomer

EKS

Databricks

Delta Lake

Fivetran

Hightouch

Terraform

Job description

Hims & Hers is the leading health and wellness platform, on a mission to help the world feel great through the power of better health. We are redefining healthcare by putting the customer first and delivering access to care that is affordable, accessible, and personal, from diagnosis to treatment to delivery. No two people are the same, so we provide access to personalized care designed for results. By normalizing health & wellness challenges and innovating on their solutions, we're making better health outcomes easier to achieve.

Hims & Hers is a public company, traded on the NYSE under the ticker symbol "HIMS." To learn more about the brand and offerings, you can visit hims.com/about and hims.com/how-it-works . For information on the company’s outstanding benefits, culture, and its talent-first flexible/remote work approach, see below and visit www.hims.com/careers-professionals.

About the Role:

We're looking for a Principal Data Engineer to be the most senior individual contributor on the Data Platform Engineering (DPE) team at Hims & Hers. In this role, you will define and align the architectural vision for our data platform with business goals – working in close partnership with product, engineering, and data science leadership. Your scope is org-wide: you will set technical direction across every surface DPE owns, drive the highest-stakes architectural decisions, and establish the standards that the entire data engineering discipline operates by.

Our platform serves millions of patients across telehealth, prescription, and wellness products. It runs on GCP BigQuery, Airflow on Astronomer/EKS, dbt, Confluent Kafka, Databricks Delta Lake, and Terraform/OpenTofu – and it is in active, consequential evolution: a net-new streaming platform, and a lower environments strategy being built from scratch. You will own those architectural bets.

You Will:

• Own the long-term technical architecture for DPE across ingestion, orchestration, event streaming, and the platform infrastructure that enables transformation and serving - driving the highest-stakes decisions for the CDC-based streaming platform (Kafka → Flink → BigQuery), orchestration platform evaluation, and lower environment strategy

• Chair Architecture Review Committee (ARC) decisions; act as the primary technical DRI for cross-team, multi-system, and cost-impacting changes

• Establish and enforce engineering standards and production readiness criteria across all DPE-owned systems - testing requirements, CI/CD patterns, observability-as-code, logging standards, data contracts, Schema Registry governance, and what 'production-ready' means for emerging streaming and CDC capabilities

• Own data quality and observability architecture - dbt anomaly detection frameworks, schema validation, data drift alerting, and the platform standards that ensure consumers can trust the data they build on

• Define the technical strategy for self-service analytics: what platform capabilities enable Analytics Engineering to work independently, what guardrails prevent downstream breakage, and how DPE reduces its bottleneck over time

• Own evaluation, onboarding, and ongoing governance of DPE-managed tooling - Fivetran, Confluent, and equivalent platforms, including contract management, cost tracking, and deprecation decisions

• Own data sharing and egress patterns - access provisioning, cross-team data contracts, reverse ETL (Hightouch), and governed consumption paths for internal and external consumers

• Drive cost governance for platform infrastructure - BigQuery slot reservations, query optimization, partition strategies, orchestration rightsizing, and cloud spend accountability across the full DPE stack

• Lead incident response for platform-level P1/P2 incidents: act as technical escalation point, facilitate blameless RCAs, and drive systemic fixes that prevent recurrence

• Produce exemplary technical artifacts - architecture decision records, solution design docs, RFCs - that create alignment and become the team's reference standard

• Mentor and elevate Staff and Senior Data Engineers; raise the technical ceiling through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on pairing

• Partner cross-functionally with ML/Data Science, legal/security/compliance, and DevOps to deliver platform capabilities that are ML-ready, compliant with HIPAA/GDPR, and hardened at the infrastructure layer

• Contribute hands-on to critical path work

You Have:

• 15+ years of professional experience designing, building, and owning data platform architecture at company scale

• Demonstrated ability to define and align architectural vision with business goals across an entire engineering organization

• Deep expertise in cloud-native data platforms across GCP primary (BigQuery, GCS, Dataflow); AWS operational familiarity required (EKS-based Airflow) - BigQuery strongly preferred; multi-cloud fluency is required, not a plus

• Hands-on experience with the modern data stack: experience governing dbt at platform scale, Airflow/Astronomer, Kafka/Confluent, Databricks/Spark, Fivetran, and data sharing/activation platforms (Hightouch or equivalent)

• Experience designing and operating event streaming pipelines at scale - including Schema Registry, data contracts, and consumer lag management

• Proven track record establishing engineering standards across multiple teams and driving adoption without direct authority

• Experience owning data quality frameworks - dbt testing, anomaly detection, schema validation, and data observability tooling

• Experience with data governance and compliance frameworks in a regulated environment - HIPAA/PHI handling, data classification, access controls, audit logging, and GDPR

• Experience leading incident response for data platform outages - blameless RCA, systemic root cause identification, and operational improvement

• Infrastructure-as-code fluency - Terraform or equivalent; you treat infrastructure changes like software changes

• Strong Python and SQL skills; comfortable writing, reviewing, and raising the bar on production-grade pipeline code

• Clear written communication: you produce design docs and RFCs that build alignment, not confusion. Comfort operating in ambiguity - you define the path, you don't wait for it to be defined

Preferred Qualifications:

• Databricks, Unity Catalog, and Delta Lake in production at scale

• Experience with CDC (Change Data Capture) patterns and Flink for real-time data processing

• PySpark/SparkSQL for large-scale batch and streaming workloads

• Experience driving a BigQuery → Databricks Lakehouse migration or equivalent cloud data warehouse migration

• Experience with MLOps - partnering with ML engineers on model training pipelines, feature stores, and experimentation infrastructure

• Go or Python service development for Kafka producers and consumers

• Experience at a direct-to-consumer healthcare or telehealth company with HIPAA and GDPR obligations

• Familiarity with SOX compliance controls in a data engineering context

Our Benefits (there are more but here are some highlights):

• Competitive salary & equity compensation for full-time roles

• Unlimited PTO, company holidays, and quarterly mental health days

• Comprehensive health benefits including medical, dental & vision, and parental leave

• Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)

• 401k benefits with employer matching contribution

• Offsite team retreats

We are committed to building a workforce that reflects diverse perspectives and prioritizes ethics, wellness, and a strong sense of belonging.

Hims considers all qualified applicants for employment, including applicants with arrest or conviction records, in accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, the California Fair Chance Act, and any similar state or local fair chance laws.

It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

Hims & Hers is committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities and disabled veterans in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please contact us at [e-mail] and describe the needed accommodation. Your privacy is important to us, and any information you share will only be used for the legitimate purpose of considering your request for accommodation. Hims & Hers gives consideration to all qualified applicants without regard to any protected status, including disability. Please do not send resumes to this email address.

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