Principal Data Engineer

About Ledger Investing

Ledger Investing is a Y Combinator-backed Insurtech startup that is transforming the way insurance risk is financed.  Today, Ledger is an online marketplace, focusing on the securitization of insurance.   Insurance securitization has quickly grown to be a $100 billion market but is limited in scope due to opacity and complexity.  Ledger is expanding this market to $1 trillion by building a seamless data platform from the policyholder to the capital markets, enabling transparency, and bringing best-in-class analytics and real-time insights to the table.  Our recent $75 million Series B round of investment funding has set us up for exponential growth. We are on our way to disrupting the industry by serving as an unparalleled, advantageous marketplace for virtually all types of insurance risks and capital, including traditional reinsurers, institutional investors, and accredited investors.

About the Team:

The engineering team is a remote-first team building innovative web platforms, data infrastructure, and developer APIs that shape how users understand and manage billions of dollars of insurance risk. Engineers at Ledger have the opportunity to touch every part of the tech stack and impact the future of our company. We collaborate constantly with product thinkers, designers, sales, and domain experts to carefully craft best-in-class customer experiences. We communicate often and treat each other with kindness and respect. We believe in continuous improvement and constantly evaluate what works and what doesn’t to raise the bar on our products. We’re NOT about endless, boring meetings 😴 We focus on getting things done!

About the role:

As a Principal Data Engineer at Ledger, you will be a pivotal leader within our Core Technology team, marrying the hands-on skills of data engineering with the strategic foresight of data architecture. This dual-focus role is designed for an individual adept at building scalable data infrastructures from the ground up (the engineer) and conceptualizing the overarching data systems that enable business growth (the architect). This individual will lead a team of data engineers to build out our Ledger’s data infrastructure.

You will be working on:

Data Engineering:

• Lead the technical design and construction of a green-field data infrastructure, ensuring scalability, reliability, and efficiency.
• Implement a robust data pipeline for ingestion, transformation, enrichment, association, validation, and final data representations (data warehouses, graph databases, vector databases), and redistribution.
• Optimize data flow and collection for cross-functional teams, focusing on the technical aspects of data handling and manipulation.

Data Architectural Design:

• Develop a strategic approach to align the overarching data architecture with business goals, emphasizing long-term data usability and system integrity.
• Define and implement data models and database structures that efficiently represent business entities across various systems with a key focus on data usability and accessibility.
• Guide the selection of data platforms and technologies (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks) from an architectural perspective, ensuring they fit the company's strategic data needs.

Collaboration and Leadership: 

• Collaborate closely with senior management in Product and Engineering to ensure data initiatives support and drive organizational goals.
• Mentor and develop a team of data engineers, fostering a culture of excellence and continuous learning within the team.
• Act as the primary liaison between the data engineering team and other technical and non-technical stakeholders, translating complex data concepts into actionable business strategies.

Qualifications:

• Proven track record of building green-field data infrastructures.
• Extensive experience with data technologies totaling 15+ years.
• Minimum of 10 years of experience in leading projects, mentoring engineers, and strategizing on data architecture.
• Minimum of 5 years of hands-on experience with Snowflake, Databricks, EMR, Hadoop, and Spark.
• Strong expertise in data modeling and designing for data usability.
• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or a similar field.

Benefits:

• Generous salary, bonus potential and equity compensation  
• Work from anywhere (Our headquarters are in New York, but this position can be full-time remote)
• Uncapped paid vacation time
• Paid Holidays
• 401k
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance -