Principal Software Development Engineer

auger; Bellevue (KY); On-site; USD 280,000 - 330,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

401(k) with company match

Commuter benefits

Job summary

Auger is seeking a Principal Software Development Engineer to lead hands-on data engineering and AI framework development. You will shape medallion-style pipelines, guarantee data quality, and align data models with customer-facing product experiences.

You will partner with product, science, and data-tools teams to translate ambiguous needs into durable data designs, while driving reliability and observability across data and ML pipelines.

Qualifications

• 10+ years in professional software/data engineering development.
• 8+ years hands-on SQL and Python; strong with at least one large-scale engine (e.g. Spark).
• Experience designing and building large-scale data pipelines and lakehouse architectures.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement reusable, agentic AI frameworks across heterogeneous data sources and medallion-style pipelines.
• Own data engineering architecture, establish standards for lakehouse pipelines, data quality, and schema contracts.
• Collaborate with product, science, and data-tools teams to translate needs into durable data designs and contracts.
• Establish operating excellence: define correctness, testing, observability, SLOs, and incident response for data systems.
• Bridge data pipelines and ML pipelines, producing schema-bound datasets and reliable ML outputs.

Skills

SQL

Python

Spark

Data engineering

ETL

Data quality

Observability

Leadership

Communication

Education

Computer Science degree or equivalent

Tools

Databricks

Job description

About the Team

Every autonomous execution decision Auger makes starts with the AI Enablement Engineering team. This team transforms complex, disconnected customer data into a rich semantic backbone that gives our AI systems a deep understanding of each customer’s business. This team's work gives our AI the context it needs to reason, plan, and execute. This isn’t just a data engineering team. It's the team building the tools and the layer that gives Auger a competitive edge and enables delivery of measurable business outcomes for our customers.

What You’ll Do

As a Principal Software Development Engineer, you bring a strong data engineering background. You will lead hands‑on execution while raising the bar for how we build, validate, and operate data systems.

• Design and implement reusable, agentic AI frameworks across heterogeneous customer data sources so the team can rapidly discover schemas and semantics, generate ETL transformation logic in medallion style that hydrates the gold semantic layer, write performant SQL, and run efficient end‑to‑end data troubleshooting in a consistent, scalable way. Mentor the team on AI‑native best practices.


• Own data engineering architectural designs and shape technical direction for the data team: standards for medallion‑style lakehouse pipelines, boundaries between layers, evolution strategies, and data quality standards.


• Partner across product, science, and the data‑tools platform to translate ambiguous needs into durable designs—aligning data models, semantics, and schema contracts with what customers experience in the product. Align business validation rules and data contracts with the Science team, and requirement‑definition contracts with the Product team.


• Operating excellence: Practice operating excellence and test‑driven engineering for data: define what “correct” means for critical datasets, and encode that in dev → test → prod paths. Institutionalize observability and reliability engineering for data: SLOs, monitoring, incident response, backfill/replay strategy, and elimination of recurring failure modes.


• Own the interface where data pipelines and ML pipelines meet. Turn data pipeline outputs into schema‑bound datasets that feed machine learning. Turn ML results into reliable writes to the semantic layer. Define and enforce clear schemas and contracts to decouple fast‑moving model logic from the system of record.

What You Bring

• Degree in Computer Science or another data‑intensive field, with principal‑level experience. 10+ years in professional development, including 8+ years hands‑on with SQL and Python and strong familiarity with at least one large‑scale engine (e.g. Spark). 8+ years across data management (structured and semi‑structured), modern warehouses/lakehouses, ETL/validation, and schema design in complex domains.


• Production ownership: Track record owning large‑scale production data systems in distributed environments—on‑call, incidents, and lasting reliability improvements (not just one‑off fixes).


• Engineering discipline for data: Test‑driven habits for transforms—unit/integration patterns, contract tests between layers, and data quality checks tied to business meaning. Experience defining standards for quality, observability, anomaly detection, or reliability and getting teams to adopt them.


• AI‑native workflow: Comfortable with AI‑assisted development for data work, with rigorous validation—you recognize when generated SQL or pipelines are wrong and know how to prove they’re right.


• Leadership & Communication: Technical leadership through ambiguity—set direction for frameworks and conventions, mentor others, communicate clearly both with customers and with internal technical and non‑technical partners.


• Deep curiosity in ambiguous, high‑impact problems; sound judgment under urgency; patience to fix root causes, not symptoms.


• A plus if you have prior experience in supply chain, planning, or fulfillment domains.

Compensation & Benefits

As part of our commitment to People Powered Greatness, we invest in our team members with competitive compensation and a comprehensive benefits to support your health, financial future, and daily life. The package includes medical, dental, and vision coverage, a 401(k) with company match, and commuter benefits. Total compensation may include a combination of a competitive base salary and equity. Your initial placement within our salary range will be based on your experience, qualifications.

The base pay range for this role is $280,000 – $330,000 per year.