Principal Data Engineer (streaming and real-time data systems)

Pointclickcare; United States; Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Retirement Plan Matching

Flexible Paid Time Off

Wellness Support Programs

Parental & Caregiver Leaves

Fertility & Adoption Support

Continuous Development Support

Employee Assistance Program

Employee Recognition

Job summary

Pointclickcare is looking for a Principal Data Engineer to design and deliver scalable streaming data solutions. The role involves optimizing real-time data pipelines and collaborating with cross-functional teams.

The ideal candidate will have over 10 years in data engineering, including expertise in technologies like Apache Kafka and Flink, and a deep understanding of cloud platforms. Benefits include a retirement plan, flexible PTO, and wellness support programs.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software or data engineering, including 4 years focused on streaming and real-time data systems.
• Proven experience driving technical direction and mentoring engineers.
• Deep expertise in streaming data technologies.
• Experience implementing resilient, low-latency data pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Lead and implement scalable streaming data pipelines.
• Engineer and optimize real-time data solutions.
• Collaborate cross-functionally on data strategy.
• Ensure data governance and performance tuning.

Skills

Streaming and real-time data systems

Apache Kafka

Flink

Spark Streaming

Cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP)

Data quality practices

CI/CD integration

Data governance

Distributed systems

Job description

Travel to Office Expectations

For Remote Roles: If this role is remote, there will be in-office events that will require travel to and from the Mississauga and/or Salt Lake City office. These will include, but not limited to, onboarding, team events, semi-annual and annual team meetings.

For Hybrid Roles: If this role is hybrid, there will be an expectation to reside within commutable distance to the office/location specified in the job listing. This will include, but not limited to, weekly/bi-weekly/monthly events in the office with your specific team. This is a requirement for this role.

PointClickCare is searching for a Principal Data Engineer who will contribute to best-practice data engineering by designing and rigorously delivering production-grade streaming pipelines on a regular basis, while also encouraging and optimizing the daily execution of technical excellence across an empowered team. This is a hands‑on leadership role, requiring the ability to enhance and implement batch and real‑time data solutions already in progress, mentor other team members, and deliver both business and technical objectives through ambiguity and uncertainty.

This is an opportunity to shape the future of our data ecosystem. You’ll work with a passionate team and modern technologies to drive innovation that impacts the entire organization. The ideal candidate thrives as an individual contributor, while making a significant technical impact and elevating the team’s capabilities.

To succeed as a Principal Data Engineer at PointClickCare, you need to be collaborative, adventurous and passionate. Collaborative means that you’re enthusiastic about jumping in to help achieve the team’s top priorities, no self‑promoting politicians allowed. Adventurous means that you’re not afraid to dive into uncharted technical territory and get your own hands dirty, while supporting and driving delivery of complex features through a dedicated Scrum team. Passionate means that you’re eager to learn and share knowledge that drives the team forward, and excited to be part of a movement that is positively impacting the lives of seniors and their caregivers all over North America.

What Your Day-to-Day Will Look Like

• Lead and guide the design and implementation of scalable streaming data pipelines
• Engineer and optimize real‑time data solutions using frameworks like Apache Kafka, Flink, and Spark Streaming
• Collaborate cross‑functionally with product, analytics, and AI teams to ensure data is a strategic asset
• Advance ongoing modernization efforts, deepening adoption of event‑driven architectures and cloud‑native technologies
• Drive adoption of best practices in data governance, observability, and performance tuning for streaming workloads
• Embed data quality in processing pipelines by defining schema contracts, implementing transformation tests and data assertions, enforcing backward‑compatible schema evolution, and automating checks for freshness, completeness, and accuracy across batch and streaming paths before production deployment
• Establish robust observability for data pipelines by implementing metrics, logging, and distributed tracing for streaming jobs, defining SLAs and SLOs for latency and throughput, and integrating alerting and dashboards to enable proactive monitoring and rapid incident response
• Foster a culture of quality through peer reviews, providing constructive feedback and seeking input on your own work

What Qualifications We’re Looking For

• Principal Data Engineer with at least 10 years of professional experience in software or data engineering, including a minimum of 4 years focused on streaming and real‑time data systems
• Proven experience driving technical direction and mentoring engineers while delivering complex, high‑scale solutions as a hands‑on contributor
• Deep expertise in streaming and real‑time data technologies, including frameworks such as Apache Kafka, Flink, and Spark Streaming
• Strong understanding of event‑driven architectures and distributed systems, with hands‑on experience implementing resilient, low‑latency pipelines
• Practical experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and containerized deployments for data workloads
• Fluency in data quality practices and CI/CD integration, including schema management, automated testing, and validation frameworks (e.g., dbt, Great Expectations)
• Operational excellence in observability, with experience implementing metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting for data pipelines using modern tools
• Solid foundation in data governance and performance optimization, ensuring reliability and scalability across batch and streaming environments
• Experience with Lakehouse architectures and related technologies, including Databricks, Azure ADLS Gen2, and Apache Hudi
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with the ability to influence stakeholders and evangelize modern data practices within your team and across the organization

Additional Qualities We Value

• Strong analytical and problem‑solving mindset
• Ability to learn quickly and adapt to new technologies, even when uncomfortable
• Self‑starter who thrives with minimal supervision and collaborates effectively as a team player
• Excellent organizational and critical‑thinking skills
• Comfortable leveraging AI tools to accelerate development

Benefits & Perks

• Retirement Plan Matching
• Flexible Paid Time Off
• Wellness Support Programs and Resources
• Parental & Caregiver Leaves
• Fertility & Adoption Support
• Continuous Development Support Program
• Employee Assistance Program
• Allyship and Inclusion Communities
• Employee Recognition and more

It is the policy of PointClickCare to ensure equal employment opportunity without discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, religion, national origin, status, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital or domestic/civil partnership status, disability, veteran status, genetic information, or any other basis protected by law. PointClickCare welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available upon request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process. Please contact [e-mail] should you require any accommodations.

PointClickCare is committed to Information Security. By applying to this position, if hired, you commit to following our information security policies and procedures and making every effort to secure confidential and/or sensitive information.