Principal Data Engineer

Job title: Principal Data Engineer 

Reports to: Principal Software Engineer 

Department: Data Services

Location: Remote
Grade: 20

About Priority: 

Priority Technology Holdings, Inc. is a leading financial technology company on a mission to deliver a personalized, easy-to-adopt financial toolset that accelerates cash flow and optimizes working capital for businesses. Our vision is to eliminate the barriers to unlocking revenue - empowering businesses to grow faster and operate smarter.

We achieve this through the Priority Commerce Engine, an innovative platform that combines payables, acquiring, and banking and treasury solutions. This unified approach allows businesses to streamline financial operations, reduce unnecessary costs, and uncover new revenue opportunities.

At Priority, we're driven by results. We expect our people to be known for results - bringing expertise, momentum, and relentless focus to every challenge, helping our clients and each other thrive.

About the Role:

A Principal Data Engineer is a senior technical leader responsible for designing, building, and optimizing scalable data architectures that support advanced analytics, machine learning, and business intelligence initiatives. They provide strategic direction on data engineering practices, ensuring high standards of data quality, security, and governance across the organization.

This role involves leading the development of robust data pipelines, real-time processing systems, and large-scale data warehouses or lakehouse platforms. Principal Data Engineers collaborate closely with data scientists, analysts, and business stakeholders to deliver reliable, accessible, and actionable data.

Responsibilities: 

• Drive the strategic design and evolution of highly optimized, secure, and scalable ETL/ELT data pipelines across diverse, complex data sources 

• Define the technical vision and architecture for enterprise data platforms, ensuring alignment with business objectives and regulatory requirements 

• Partner with senior leaders across engineering, product, and operations to identify systemic challenges and deliver innovative, resilient data solutions 

• Architect and operationalize data marts and domain-oriented data models that enable reliable, performant, and democratized access for analytics and AI/ML use cases 

• Lead the design and rollout of API-based, event-driven data services that power mission-critical products and real-time decisioning 

• Establish enterprise-grade observability frameworks, including automated testing, lineage tracking, and monitoring systems for proactive detection and rapid remediation of data issues 

• Serve as a thought leader and mentor, elevating the technical bar across engineering teams, and embedding best practices in data engineering, security, and governance 

• Champion the adoption of emerging tools, cloud technologies, and methodologies to future-proof the platform and increase efficiency at scale 

• Influence long-term data strategy and standards, ensuring consistency, scalability, and compliance across the organization

What Success Looks Like:

Success in a Principal Data Engineer role is defined by how well you enable the organization to leverage data as a strategic asset—through building reliable systems, setting high standards, and guiding both technology and people.

• Systems scale seamlessly with business growth, handling increasing data volume, velocity, and variety.

• Downtime, latency, and data quality issues are minimized through resilient design.

• Data solutions directly enable faster insights, predictive modeling, and AI/ML capabilities.

• Best practices for coding, testing, and deployment are established and widely adopted.

Candidate Requirements: