Principal Engineer - Data Platforms

It's fun to work in a company where people truly believe in what they are doing. At Dutch Bros Coffee, we are more than just a coffee company. We are a fun-loving, mind-blowing company that makes a difference one cup at a time. 

Position Overview:
As the Principal Engineer in the Enterprise Data Platform, you will lead the modernization and optimization of Dutch Bros’ foundational data ecosystem. In this high-impact, hands-on individual contributor role, you will design and operate scalable, resilient infrastructure to power distributed analytics, machine learning, and AI-driven workflows. You are a builder at heart—responsible for writing proof-of-concepts, defining rigorous coding standards, and championing AI-assisted development tools that reduce toil and accelerate team velocity. By partnering with other principal engineers and mentoring the broader team, you will bridge the gap between high-level architecture and seamless execution to deliver a world-class, self-service data experience for the entire organization.

Job Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with a minimum of 10 years specializing in backend distributed systems or data infrastructure at scale.

• Expert-level Python and SQL proficiency (10+ years) rooted in a career of building production-grade software.

• Proven track record of designing large-scale data platforms with a deep understanding of CAP theorem, eventual consistency, and the trade-offs between batch and streaming architectures.

• Hands-on mastery of Snowflake (internals and clustering), dbt (macro design and Jinja), Airflow (scheduler internals), and Power BI (Import vs. Live connection).

• Comprehensive knowledge of AWS services, including IAM, VPC, Glue, S3, SFTP, Lambda, CloudWatch, and SNS.

• Experience implementing Gitlab CI/CD and DataDog for robust system monitoring and alerting.

• Ability to design RAG architectures, manage vector databases, and integrate LLMs into complex data pipelines.

• Skilled in writing persuasive RFCs and ADRs that drive consensus among architects and engineering leadership.

• Proven ability to influence technical strategy and facilitate cross-functional alignment across organizational levels without direct managerial authority.

Location Requirement: 
This role is located in Tempe, Arizona. This position is required to be in office 4 days per week (Mon-Thurs); Fridays are optional remote work days.

Key Result Areas (KRAs):

Technical Strategy & Platform Architecture

• Define the long-term technical architecture for the Enterprise Data Platform, translating business strategy into scalable Data Mesh and domain-oriented specifications.

• Implement automated CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to foster a unified engineering culture across disciplines.

• Design robust APIs that enable seamless data consumption across operations, finance, and product teams.

AI-Assisted Development & Integration

• Lead the integration of AI-assisted development (Cursor, MCP, Copilot) to accelerate developer velocity and reduce cognitive load.

• Scale LLM-driven code generation for AWS data pipelines, including automated test creation, documentation, and semantic schema generation.

• Leverage Amazon Bedrock, Snowflake Cortex, and AI-enabled IDEs to optimize the data lifecycle and reduce delivery lead times.

Data Engineering at Scale

• Build resilient ELT/ETL pipelines utilizing S3, Lambda, Glue, dbt, and Airflow (MWAA).

• Establish data quality, observability, lineage, and SLAs as core, first-class features of the data platform.

• Standardize enterprise-wide schema design, modeling patterns, and deployment workflows.

Machine Learning & Infrastructure

• Design and productionize end-to-end ML infrastructure, including feature stores, model experimentation frameworks, and deployment monitoring.

• Build optimized ETL/ELT workflows for training data and model deployment leveraging Snowflake ML (Snowpark) and Amazon SageMaker.