Principal Data Engineer

Principal Data EngineerThe Daily Wire is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to architect and build the systems connecting our subscribers, content, advertising, and digital products. This hands-on role will work across backend services, event-driven pipelines, cloud infrastructure, analytical models, and personalization systems to strengthen our data foundations and support AI-driven content discovery. The ideal candidate brings a strong software engineering background, deep expertise in data-intensive systems, and the ability to influence technical strategy across infrastructure, analytics, and product-facing platforms.Primary ResponsibilitiesArchitect and drive the long-term vision for Daily Wire's enterprise data ecosystem, including infrastructure, ingestion, storage, transformation, and real-time analytics.Lead the design and implementation of distributed systems, high-availability APIs, event streams, and real-time data pipelines.Build resilient, production-grade backend services and data workflows using Python or Go and advanced SQL.Design and scale Snowflake data warehouses and layered dbt models that transform complex operational data into reliable data products.Partner with product and analytics leaders to establish event schemas, tracking standards, and unified semantic layers.Architect and operate production machine-learning infrastructure, low-latency inference systems, and feedback loops that power content discovery and personalization.Establish architectural and operational standards for testing, observability, security, reliability, and cost efficiency.Provide technical leadership across AWS cloud infrastructure, containerized services, architecture reviews, code mentorship, and incident response.Experience & RequirementsBachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.10+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, analytics infrastructure, or data-intensive platform development.Advanced experience with Snowflake and dbt, including warehouse design, transformation architecture, testing, documentation, data lineage, query optimization, and cost governance.Proven experience building and operating enterprise-grade platforms on AWS, including SageMaker and Personalize.Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, system observability, and production operations.Experience with streaming and messaging technologies such as Kafka, Segment, AWS Kinesis, Kinesis Data Firehose, or Apache Flink.Experience building pipelines that support machine-learning model training, serving, recommendation systems, and content personalization.Knowledge of event-time processing, windowing, checkpointing, and schema evolution.Experience creating analytics and reporting solutions using visualization tools such as Tableau.Experience with subscription media, streaming video, content discovery, payments, digital advertising, or high-growth consumer products is preferred.Exceptional problem-solving, debugging, written communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.Daily Wire provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training.Please Note: Daily Wire participates in E-Verify and performs background checks on all new hires. We will provide the Social Security Administration (SSA) and if necessary, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with information from each new employee's form I-9 to confirm work authorization. Thank you!CALIFORNIA APPLICANT PRIVACY NOTICE