Principal Data Engineer

Upside

Principal Data Engineer managing data platform and transforming commerce at Upside. Leading modernization, data products design, and technical planning for impactful business decisions.

Posted 6/22/2026full-timeWashington, D.C. • Washington • 🇺🇸 United StatesLead💰 $215,000 - $250,000 per yearWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AWSCloudTerraform

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Lead platform modernization; deprecate legacy workflows, migrate pipelines to scalable patterns, and sharpen our CI/CD and developer experience
Drive infrastructure and FinOps initiatives across Snowflake, Dagster, and dbt; reducing cost, improving governance, and increasing maintainability
Own platform evolution projects like making data consumable by agentic tools and workflows, and improving orchestration across the analytics stack
Design and deliver complex, domain-critical data products used by analysts, data scientists, and product teams to ship features and drive strategy
Architect reusable, extensible patterns for modeling, orchestration, and transformation; balancing flexibility, cost, and long-term maintainability
Lead technical planning across cross-functional teams, breaking down large data initiatives into scoped, sequenced workstreams
Mentor engineers, build internal documentation and tooling, and raise the overall standard for analytics engineering at Upside
Partner with engineering, product, data science, and business stakeholders to deliver end-to-end solutions
Represent Data Engineering in design forums and shape the future roadmap for data at Upside

Requirements

What you’ll need

8+ years in data or analytics engineering with a track record of owning complex, business-critical systems end to end
Hands-on experience with AWS; deployments, workload management, cloud infrastructure and the modern data stack (Snowflake, dbt, Dagster, Databricks, Terraform)
A track record of leading platform migrations, deprecations, or upgrades across shared systems; balancing technical risk, continuity, and long-term maintainability
Ability to design secure, reusable patterns for data ingestion, access control, and platform automation and comfort partnering with Infrastructure, Security, and Governance stakeholders
Experience with DevOps practices (CI/CD for data), data governance, or FinOps
Ability to break down ambiguous, cross-functional problems and lead implementation from design to deployment
Clear communication across all audiences; engineers, analysts, product managers, and business leaders
A genuine drive to mentor others, set standards, and leave every system better than you found it

Benefits

Comp & perks

Medical, dental, and vision coverage starting on Day 1
Equity (ISOs)
401(k) program
Family planning programs + paid parental leave
Physical fitness and wellness memberships
Emotional and mental health support programs
Unlimited PTO + 10 paid federal holidays + our annual, week-long Winter Break
Flexible work environment
Lunch reimbursement for in-office employees
Employee Resource Groups
Learning and Development stipend
Transparent culture
Amazing mission!

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

data engineeringanalytics engineeringcloud infrastructuredata ingestiondata governanceplatform automationCI/CDFinOpsdata modelingorchestration

Soft Skills

leadershipmentoringcommunicationproblem-solvingcollaborationtechnical planningdocumentationstakeholder engagementstrategic thinkingcross-functional teamwork