Principal Engineer - Data and AI

About Pleo

At Pleo, we’re on a mission to revolutionise the way businesses manage company spending. No more outdated processes, clunky spreadsheets, or frustrating delays - we believe spend management should be seamless, empowering, and surprisingly effective for finance teams and employees alike. We’re creating tools that promote autonomy, foster trust, and let businesses focus on what truly matters. 

Our culture is built on transparency, collaboration, and a deep commitment to innovation – which is reflected in our spending solution. At Pleo, you’ll join a passionate team shaping the future of work, all while having some fun along the way.

About the role

You'll join the Data team to drive innovation and deliver impactful solutions that power our business. As a Principal Data Engineer, you'll move beyond incremental improvements to lead foundational projects. You will provide hands-on leadership to shape the future of Pleo's data architecture.

While embedded in the Data Platform Group, you’ll work directly with the VP of Data, contributing as a key member of the data leadership team. You'll collaborate extensively with Product, Engineering and Business teams to ensure our data solutions directly drive product innovation and business outcomes. You’ll help shape the future of Pleo’s data landscape, supporting multiple teams, driving strategic projects, and staying hands-on with cutting-edge technology to deliver impactful solutions.

What you’ll be doing

• Partner with product and business teams to develop data strategies that enable new features and improve user experience.
• Drive key strategic projects across the organisation, dipping in and out as needed to provide leadership and hands-on support.
• Support multiple teams across Pleo in delivering impactful data and analytics solutions.
• Build data products that directly support Pleo's product roadmap and business goals.
• Collaborate with the VP of Data and other data leaders to set the vision for Pleo’s data strategy and ensure alignment with company objectives.
• Enhance our data infrastructure and pipelines to improve scalability, performance, and data quality.
• Experiment with and implement innovative technologies to keep Pleo’s data stack at the forefront of the industry.
• Mentor engineers, analysts, and data scientists to foster growth and build a world-class data team.

To put things in context, we’ve listed below examples of previous or upcoming projects we expect Principal Data Engineers to work on so you can get a better idea of what you might be doing:

• Data catalog and data literacy: Spearhead the implementation of a new data catalog to empower the entire organization with accessible, high-quality data.
• Data platform & warehousing strategy: Lead the revamp of our data infrastructure and our dbt architecture to ensure it can scale for the future.
• AI engineering strategy: Support our Product & Engineering teams in structuring and building new AI platform tools for internal & external usage. 
• Community of Practice: Foster and grow our internal data community, establishing best practices and mentoring technical peers across the company. This could include upskilling the team on engineering best practices, coaching colleagues on complex data pipelines or jumping in to debug things where needed.

In addition to this, you can expect to work with the following tech stack at Pleo:

• We’re working with both AWS and GCP as well as Kubernetes as we have a hybrid infrastructure. 
• We of course work with Python and SQL alongside airflow for orchestration and kafka for event-driven processing. 
• Our data warehouse is currently in BigQuery, and serving dbt and Looker. 

What you bring

We're looking for a strategic thinker who can translate complex business challenges into scalable data solutions. You will thrive in this role if you have:

• High proficiency in Python with a proven track record of delivering high-quality data pipelines and products at scale.
• Experience in designing, building, maintaining and scaling data platforms with experience in both the AWS and GCP ecosystems. 
• Experience in building data products for analytics purposes, with a focus on AI/ML applications. 
• Expertise in designing systems and data architecture serving platform, product and analytics purposes.
• The ability to inspire and act as a trusted mentor who builds strong partnerships.
• The ability to innovate with pragmatism, and you actively contribute to a culture of continuous learning by seeking and sharing knowledge.

Why is this role a good fit