Principal Engineer (Data Infrastructure)

About the role

Join Sezzle, a rapidly growing fintech company, as a Principal Data Engineer. In this role, you will have end-to-end ownership of our data warehousing infrastructure, design and optimize data pipelines, and architect our data ecosystem. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams and evaluate new technologies to guide the evolution of our data stack. This position offers comprehensive benefits, remote work flexibility, and opportunities for career advancement. Key missions: End to end ownership of data warehousing infrastructure, including design, build, and optimization of data pipelines.. Lead development of ETL/ELT workflows using modern data tooling, and partner with cross-functional teams to deliver high-quality datasets.. Evaluate and integrate new technologies, guiding the evolution of the data stack and infrastructure. Profile: - Experience building and maintaining AWS-based data platforms, including S3, Lambda, Glue, or EMR - Proficiency in SQL (advanced level) and at least one programming language such as Python, Scala, or Java - Ability to work in a fast-paced, collaborative environment with excellent communication and documentation skills - Strong understanding of data modeling, distributed systems, and warehouse/lake design patterns - Track record designing scalable, fault-tolerant data pipelines using modern orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, etc.) processing more than 100GB - 1 TB of new data a day - 12+ years of experience in data engineering, with a strong track record of building and scaling production-grade systems - Strong hands-on experience with ETL/ELT frameworks, especially DBT, AWS DMS, or similar tools - Deep expertise with AWS Redshift or similar products, including performance tuning, table design, and workload management - Familiarity with streaming technologies (Kafka, Kinesis, Flink, Spark Streaming) - You have relentlessly high standards - many people may think your standards are unreasonably high. You are continually raising the bar and driving those around you to deliver great results. You make sure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed - Enthusiasm for automation, CI/CD for data, and infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation) - You’re not bound by convention - your success—and much of the fun—lies in developing new ways to do things - You earn trust - you listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully - You deliver results - you focus on the key inputs and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, you rise to the occasion and never settle - Experience leading data platform migrations, warehouse re-architectures, or large-scale performance overhauls - You need action - speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking - Knowledge of lakehouse architectures and modern stacks such as Snowflake, Databricks, Iceberg, or Delta Lake - You have backbone; disagree, then commit - you can respectfully challenge decisions when you disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. You have conviction and are tenacious. You do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, you commit wholly - Prior experience in high-growth, data-intensive fintech or similar regulated environments - Exposure to machine learning pipelines, feature stores, or MLOps concepts