Principal Data Engineer

Why You’ll Love This Job

As a Principal Data Engineer at Apptegy, you will define the technical vision for our data platform and guide how data is used across our entire product suite. This role is about leverage, setting architectural direction, establishing standards, and enabling teams to build reliable, data-driven products at scale.

You will operate as a senior technical leader across the organization, working closely with Engineering, Product, Analytics, and Leadership to ensure our data systems are scalable, secure, and trusted. Rather than focusing solely on delivery within a single team, you will influence how data is designed, moved, and governed across Apptegy.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys navigating ambiguity, has strong opinions informed by experience, and is energized by mentoring Staff-level engineers while shaping long-term strategy.

What You’ll Do

Define data architecture at scale

Set the end-to-end architectural vision for Apptegy’s data platform, spanning ingestion, transformation, storage, and consumption across batch and real-time systems.

Lead platform evolution

Drive major data platform initiatives and re-architecture efforts to support growth, new products, and increasing data volume and complexity.

Establish standards and contracts

Define data contracts, ownership boundaries, and patterns that enable reliable, near-real-time data synchronization across services.

Champion quality and governance

Set expectations for data quality, lineage, observability, SLAs, privacy, and security, particularly for sensitive student and district data.

Own entity strategy

Define approaches for entity resolution across core domains including Students, Staff, Guardians, and Organizations, incorporating matching strategies, survivorship rules, and auditability.

Influence across teams

Lead architecture discussions, document technical decisions, and guide technical direction without direct authority.

Mentor senior engineers

Coach Staff and Senior Data Engineers, raising the bar for technical excellence and architectural thinking across the organization.

What You’ll Bring (Must-Haves)

• 10+ years of experience in data or software engineering with demonstrated impact at Staff or Principal scope

• Proven experience defining and evolving data platform strategy in a cloud-native environment, preferably AWS

• Deep expertise in event-driven and streaming architectures such as Kafka, Kinesis, or Pub/Sub alongside batch systems

• Strong data architecture and modeling experience using lakehouse, medallion, data vault, or similar patterns

• Demonstrated success operating production data systems with high reliability, scale, and clear SLAs

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to influence senior technical and business stakeholders

What Helps You Stand Out (Nice-to-Haves)

• Experience with B2B SaaS data platforms and multi-tenant architectures

• Prior K-12, SIS, or education-related data experience

• Hands-on experience designing and operating entity resolution systems

• Strong observability practices for data systems including metrics, lineage, and data SLAs

• Exposure to ML feature pipelines or near-real-time data products

• Experience with Snowflake or other cloud data warehouses

• Open-source contributions or community involvement