Principal Data Platform Architect - Drone-Powered Analytics

Caraa; Indianapolis (IN); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Gather AI is building a data platform to power its drone-powered warehouse intelligence. As Principal Data Engineer, you will architect the data foundation, separating analytics from live production traffic and defining a semantic layer for metrics.

You will own end-to-end data ingestion, multi-tenancy, lineage, and collaboration with ML and product teams to enable scalable, trusted data across the product suite.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in data engineering, with 3+ years architecting data platforms for data products, analytics, or AI-driven products.
• Proven experience building a greenfield data warehouse and leading an OLTP to OLAP transition, not just maintaining an existing one.
• Deep expertise designing multi-layer transformation architectures and reusable frameworks that scale across multiple product areas.

Responsibilities

• Architect a greenfield, multi-layer data warehouse (raw, refined, serving) that separates analytical workloads from production OLTP traffic.
• Deliver a governed, self-service data-access layer for internal consumers first (Product, CSM, Deployment/Operations, and Leadership) as Phase 1, ahead of customer-facing conversational analytics.
• Build a semantic and metrics layer so every metric, such as 'scan accuracy by site', is defined once in code and stays identical across every dashboard and product.
• Own the quality bar: 99%+ availability SLA with freshness guarantees, 100% traceability, zero cross-tenant leakage, 99.5%+ pipeline success, and no data loss.
• Design tenant isolation, per-tenant cost attribution, and schema and row-level RBAC to scale toward hundreds of tenants (300+ target).
• Own data-ingestion correctness at the boundary with the integration/backend team, covering data contracts, schema validation, and pipeline quality.
• Stand up a data catalog and lineage layer (Purview as the Azure-native fit, DataHub as the open-source alternative) so every consumer can find data, see ownership, and trace lineage when a metric looks wrong.
• Prove the foundation end to end on Gather's drone product, then generalize it so each new product extends the model instead of rebuilding it.

Skills

Data engineering

Data platform design

SQL & dbt

ELT / Orchestration

Cloud platforms (Azure)

CI/CD

Data quality & governance

Multi-tenancy

Streaming / real-time data

Semantic & metrics layer

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Purview

DataHub

Airflow

Feature stores

Git

Job description

Gather AI is building a data platform to power its drone-powered warehouse intelligence. As Principal Data Engineer, you will architect the data foundation, separating analytics from live production traffic and defining a semantic layer for metrics.

You will own end-to-end data ingestion, multi-tenancy, lineage, and collaboration with ML and product teams to enable scalable, trusted data across the product suite.