Principal Engineer – Data Platforms

At Early Warning, we’ve powered and protected the U.S. financial system for over thirty years with cutting-edge solutions like Zelle®, Paze®, and so much more. As a trusted name in payments, we partner with thousands of institutions to increase access to financial services and protect transactions for hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses.

Positions located in Scottsdale, San Francisco, Chicago, or New York follow a hybrid work model to allow for a more collaborative working environment.

Candidates responding to this posting must independently possess the eligibility to work in the United States, for any employer, at the date of hire. This position is ineligible for employment Visa sponsorship.

Overall Purpose

This position is a hands-on Principal Engineer responsible for shaping the architecture and engineering direction for enterprise data platforms and data products. The role provides technical leadership across Data Exchange, Enterprise Data Products, data engineering, and cloud data platform capabilities, establishing scalable approaches for data ingestion, transformation, modeling, quality, governance, and consumption.

The Principal Engineer partners across Product, Engineering, Architecture, Security, and Data teams to translate business and product needs into pragmatic target and transition architectures. The role leads modernization of legacy data capabilities, enables reusable and governed data products, and remains hands-on in validating architectural patterns, solving complex technical problems, and accelerating engineering delivery.

Essential Functions

- Owns technical product design and architecture for enterprise data platforms, Data Exchange, Enterprise Data Products, data engineering, and related cloud capabilities.
- Develops and shapes departmental technical vision, including target-state and transition architectures that support incremental modernization and continuity of existing business capabilities.
- Partners with Product Management to translate product strategy and business outcomes into data capabilities, domain data products, and technology roadmaps.
- Establishes reusable engineering patterns, data contracts, domain models, integration approaches, and architectural standards across engineering teams.
- Provides technical leadership for modernization of legacy and on-premises data capabilities to cloud-based architectures, including appropriate interoperability and transition patterns.
- Collaborates with Security, Infrastructure, Cloud Platform, SRE, Data Governance, Product, and Engineering teams to ensure solutions meet scalability, resiliency, security, data quality, and operational requirements.
- Serves as a senior technical expert across data architecture, data engineering, data modeling, distributed processing, analytics, and data-product engineering, coaches and mentors engineers and technical leaders.
- Remains hands-on in evaluating technologies, prototyping, and validating architectural patterns, and resolving complex technical challenges.
- Works with internal and external customers to understand data and product needs and improve products and capabilities.
- Creates and conducts technical presentations, architecture reviews, and design reviews for engineering and leadership audiences.
- Supports the company’s commitment to risk management and protecting the integrity and confidentiality of systems and data.

Minimum Qualifications

- Education and/or experience typically obtained through a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related technical field.
- Typically has 15 years of experience or demonstrated portfolio consistent with experience required of the role, including designing and developing complex software projects and at least 8 years of experience in the FinTech domain.
- Experience leading cross-functional teams and major technical initiatives to deliver complex technology solutions.
- Proven track record designing and building complex end-to-end systems and data platforms.
- Hands-on experience designing and developing modern data platforms using technologies such as Databricks, Spark/PySpark, Kafka, Snowflake, cloud object storage, relational and NoSQL databases, Python, or comparable technologies.
- Strong understanding of modern cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- Knowledge of Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) best practices, software development methodologies such as Agile, Scrum, and LEAN, and DevOps practices.
- Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines and working with modern code repositories, build, and deployment tooling.
- Hands-on experience with test automation across unit, component, integration, and functional testing.
- Effective communication and presentation skills, including the ability to communicate complex technical concepts to audiences across the organization.
- Background and drug screen.

Preferred Qualifications

- Advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field.
- Deep experience designing and modernizing enterprise-scale data platforms and architectures across cloud and hybrid environments.
- Experience with batch, streaming, API, and file-based data ingestion and integration patterns.
- Experience designing layered data architectures and reusable patterns supporting raw, conformed, and curated data.
- Strong experience with enterprise and domain data modeling, canonical models, data contracts, and governed data products.
- Experience designing data platforms that support analytical and operational or customer-facing workloads, including low-latency consumption patterns.
- Experience implementing data quality, metadata, catalog, lineage, observability, and data-governance capabilities.
- Understanding of sensitive-data protection, tokenization, encryption, and secure data-access patterns.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code, Kubernetes or container platforms, and production-grade cloud engineering.
- Experience defining technical standards and influencing architecture and engineering decisions across multiple teams without direct authority.
- Experience using modern engineering tools, including AI-assisted development, to accelerate technical discovery, prototyping, and delivery.
- Experience in financial services, payments, fraud, identity, or other high-volume regulated data environments.

Physical Requirements

Working conditions consist of a normal office environment. Work is primarily sedentary and requires extensive use of a computer and involves sitting for periods of approximately four hours. Work may require occasional standing, walking, kneeling and reaching. Must be able to lift 10 pounds occasionally and/or negligible amount of force frequently. Requires visual acuity and dexterity to view, prepare, and manipulate documents and office equipment including personal computers. Requires the ability to communicate with internal and/or external customers.

Employee must be able to perform essential functions and physical requirements of position with or without reasonable accommodation.

The above job description is not intended to be an all-inclusive list of duties and standards of the position.

Early Warning Services is an affirmative action and equal opportunity employer.

The base pay scale for this position in:
New York City, NY in USD per year is: $207,000 - $276,000.
Additionally, candidates are eligible for a discretionary incentive plan and benefits.

This pay scale is subject to change and is not necessarily reflective of actual compensation that may be earned, nor a promise of any specific pay for any specific candidate, which is always dependent on legitimate factors considered at the time of job offer. Early Warning Services takes into consideration a variety of factors when determining a competitive salary offer, including, but not limited to, the job scope, market rates and geographic location of a position, candidate’s education, experience, training, and specialized skills or certification(s) in relation to the job requirements and compared with internal equity (peers). The business actively supports and reviews wage equity to ensure that pay decisions are not based on gender, race, national origin, or any other protected classes.

Some of the Ways We Prioritize Your Health and Happiness

- Healthcare Coverage – Competitive medical (PPO/HDHP), dental, and vision plans as well as company contributions to your Health Savings Account (HSA) or pre-tax savings through flexible spending accounts (FSA) for commuting, health & dependent care expenses.
- 401(k) Retirement Plan – Featuring a 100% Company Safe Harbor Match on your first 6% deferral immediately upon eligibility.
- Paid Time Off – Flexible Time Off for Exempt (salaried) employees, as well as generous PTO for Non-Exempt (hourly) employees, plus 11 paid company holidays and a paid volunteer day.
- 12 weeks of Paid Parental Leave
- Maven Family Planning – provides support through your Parenting journey including egg freezing, fertility, adoption, surrogacy, pregnancy, postpartum, early pediatrics, and returning to work.

And SO much more! We continue to enhance our program, so be sure to  check our Benefits page here   for the latest. Our team can share more during the interview process!

Early Warning Services, LLC (“Early Warning”) considers for employment, hires, retains and promotes qualified candidates on the basis of ability, potential, and valid qualifications without regard to race, religious creed, religion, color, sex, sexual orientation, genetic information, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, protected veteran or disability status or any factor prohibited by law, and as such affirms in policy and practice to support and promote equal employment opportunity and affirmative action, in accordance with all applicable federal, state, and municipal laws. The company also prohibits discrimination on other bases such as medical condition, marital status or any other factor that is irrelevant to the performance of our employees.

Early Warning Services LLC is a proud participant in E-Verify, a federal program to help ensure a legal and authorized workforce. As part of our hiring process, we electronically verify the employment eligibility of all new hires through E-Verify. For more information on your rights and responsibilities under E-Verify please visit Home | E-Verify .