Principal Data Engineer — Remote US (Architect & Leader)

ZoomInfo Technologies LLC; United States; Remote; USD 172,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

ZoomInfo is seeking a highly experienced Principal Data Engineer to define and evolve the architecture, standards, and operating model for our enterprise data platform. You will lead critical architectural decisions across ingestion, storage, transformation, governance, and consumption, while mentoring teams to raise the engineering bar.

You will collaborate with analytics, security, platform, and business stakeholders to build scalable, secure, and observable data products that unlock trusted,

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, platform engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• 5+ years designing and operating large-scale data platforms, distributed data systems, or enterprise-grade data products.
• Demonstrated expertise in end-to-end system design, including defining requirements, evaluating tradeoffs, designing resilient architectures, and delivering production systems.
• Deep experience with modern data architecture concepts, such as lakehouse or warehouse platforms, batch and streaming processing, data modeling, orchestration, metadata management, and data governance.
• Strong proficiency in SQL and at least one general-purpose programming language, such as Python, Java, Scala, or similar.
• Experience with distributed data processing frameworks and technologies such as Spark, Kafka, Flink, Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, or equivalent platforms.
• Strong knowledge of data modeling practices across analytical, operational, and domain-oriented use cases.
• Experience establishing engineering standards for testing, CI/CD, observability, infrastructure as code, reliability, and security.
• Proven ability to lead technical decisions across multiple teams without relying on direct authority.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical concepts and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated experience mentoring engineers and raising technical standards across an organization.

Responsibilities

• Lead Data Architecture and System Design for scalable data platforms and pipelines.
• Design end-to-end data systems spanning ingestion, transformation, storage, and consumption.
• Make and document high-quality architecture decisions with tradeoffs on performance, reliability, and cost.
• Define reusable patterns for data ingestion, schema evolution, data quality, and multi-tenant models.
• Establish clear boundaries between operational systems, data platforms, analytics layers, and downstream apps.
• Lead architecture reviews and provide direction on implementation approaches.
• Identify risks early and drive plans to mitigate debt, single points of failure, and data inconsistency.

Skills

Leadership

Architecture

Data Modeling

SQL

Python

Spark/Kafka/Flink

CI/CD

Mentoring

Tools

Python

SQL

Airflow

dbt

Snowflake

AWS

GCP

BigQuery

Redshift

Job description

ZoomInfo is seeking a highly experienced Principal Data Engineer to define and evolve the architecture, standards, and operating model for our enterprise data platform. You will lead critical architectural decisions across ingestion, storage, transformation, governance, and consumption, while mentoring teams to raise the engineering bar.

You will collaborate with analytics, security, platform, and business stakeholders to build scalable, secure, and observable data products that unlock trusted,