Principal Data Engineer

Role Description

We're looking for a Principal Data Engineer to be the most senior individual contributor on the Data Platform Engineering (DPE) team at Hims & Hers. In this role, you will define and align the architectural vision for our data platform with business goals – working in close partnership with product, engineering, and data science leadership. Your scope is org-wide: you will set technical direction across every surface DPE owns, drive the highest-stakes architectural decisions, and establish the standards that the entire data engineering discipline operates by.

Our platform serves millions of patients across telehealth, prescription, and wellness products. It runs on GCP BigQuery, Airflow on Astronomer/EKS, dbt, Confluent Kafka, Databricks Delta Lake, and Terraform/OpenTofu – and it is in active, consequential evolution: a net-new streaming platform, and a lower environments strategy being built from scratch. You will own those architectural bets.

You Will:

• Own the long-term technical architecture for DPE across ingestion, orchestration, event streaming, and the platform infrastructure that enables transformation and serving.
• Chair Architecture Review Committee (ARC) decisions; act as the primary technical DRI for cross-team, multi-system, and cost-impacting changes.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards and production readiness criteria across all DPE-owned systems.
• Own data quality and observability architecture.
• Define the technical strategy for self-service analytics.
• Own evaluation, onboarding, and ongoing governance of DPE-managed tooling.
• Own data sharing and egress patterns.
• Drive cost governance for platform infrastructure.
• Lead incident response for platform-level P1/P2 incidents.
• Produce exemplary technical artifacts.
• Mentor and elevate Staff and Senior Data Engineers.
• Partner cross-functionally with ML/Data Science, legal/security/compliance, and DevOps.
• Contribute hands-on to critical path work.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of professional experience designing, building, and owning data platform architecture at company scale.
• Demonstrated ability to define and align architectural vision with business goals across an entire engineering organization.
• Deep expertise in cloud-native data platforms across GCP primary (BigQuery, GCS, Dataflow); AWS operational familiarity required.
• Hands-on experience with the modern data stack.
• Experience designing and operating event streaming pipelines at scale.
• Proven track record establishing engineering standards across multiple teams.
• Experience owning data quality frameworks.
• Experience with data governance and compliance frameworks in a regulated environment.
• Experience leading incident response for data platform outages.
• Infrastructure-as-code fluency.
• Strong Python and SQL skills.
• Clear written communication.

Requirements

• Databricks, Unity Catalog, and Delta Lake in production at scale.
• Experience with CDC (Change Data Capture) patterns and Flink for real-time data processing.
• PySpark/SparkSQL for large-scale batch and streaming workloads.
• Experience driving a BigQuery → Databricks Lakehouse migration or equivalent cloud data warehouse migration.
• Experience with MLOps.
• Go or Python service development for Kafka producers and consumers.
• Experience at a direct-to-consumer healthcare or telehealth company with HIPAA and GDPR obligations.
• Familiarity with SOX compliance controls in a data engineering context.

Benefits

• Competitive salary & equity compensation for full-time roles.
• Unlimited PTO, company holidays, and quarterly mental health days.
• Comprehensive health benefits including medical, dental & vision, and parental leave.
• Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP).
• 401k benefits with employer matching contribution.
• Offsite team retreats.