PIPELINE - L5 Principal Software Engineer

Responsibilities

• Design and implement data platform capabilities for event ingestion and CDC, stream processing, batch orchestration, lakehouse and warehouse patterns, catalog and lineage, governance, access, and compliance.
• Define and uphold data freshness, availability, and correctness SLOs and lead readiness reviews, incident response, and post-incident learning.
• Author ADRs and RFCs, establish data contracts and schema governance, and standardize connectors and templates for data producers and consumers.
• Profile, tune, and right-size systems for performance and cost while partnering with FinOps on unit-economics guardrails.
• Partner with product, analytics, and ML teams to expose useful data abstractions and accelerate customer value.
• Write and review high-quality code and mentor Staff and Senior engineers through design documents, pairing, and enablement rather than line management.
• Apply AI and automation to data workflows including pipeline authoring and testing, catalog and search, documentation, and data-quality operations.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience building and operating distributed data systems with multi-tenant reliability.
• Expertise in data ingestion and CDC, stream processing, batch orchestration, lakehouse patterns, catalog and lineage, governance, access controls, and SLO-driven operations.
• Experience with technologies such as Kafka, Pub/Sub, Flink, Spark, Beam, Airflow, Dagster, Iceberg, Delta, Hudi, Snowflake, BigQuery, and object storage.
• Experience applying ML or generative AI to data platforms, including semantic catalog search, automated documentation, data-quality anomaly detection, and SQL or pipeline generation with privacy controls and human review.
• Ability to establish data contracts, connectors, and reusable templates and to influence and mentor engineers across teams.
• Preferred experience with regional isolation and replication, privacy-by-design, and data governance in regulated contexts.
• Preferred experience adopting standardized ingestion, processing, and storage paths, achieving strong freshness SLOs, reducing cost per terabyte, and using AI-augmented data operations.

Benefits

• Base compensation is listed separately in the posting, with potential annual cash bonus, equity, sign-on payments, and health, welfare, and wellbeing benefits based on eligibility.
• The role may require up to 10% travel for onboarding, client or partner work, team meetings, and industry events, coordinated in advance.
• Klaviyo provides workplace accommodations as needed.