Principal Data Engineer

Location: Chicago, IL or New York, NY

Base Salary Range: $200,000 - $250,000

(Base salary is only one part of Group One Trading's total compensation, which includes an annual discretionary bonus.)

THE OPPORTUNITY

Our Principal Data Engineer owns the architecture and technical direction of the data platform that powers trading analysis, reporting, and decision-making across Group One. They work closely with traders, risk, finance, and technology leadership to understand how data is produced and consumed across the firm, and translate those needs into a platform designed for reliability, scalability, and long-term evolution.

Data usage is expanding rapidly across every part of our firm, and we are building a next-generation data platform to support it. Our existing Microsoft-based environment gives us a strong foundation and deep understanding of our data as we design what comes next. This role will define that future: evaluating technologies, selecting the architecture, establishing engineering standards, and defining a migration strategy that delivers value early while moving us deliberately toward the target platform.

You will partner closely with our Senior Data Engineers who serve as the primary builders of the platform and provide technical leadership to the broader data team throughout the transition. We are looking for someone who has designed modern data platforms before, has lived with the consequences of their own architectural decisions, and knows how to make decisive technical choices while remaining open to being challenged by the engineers building alongside them.

THE SKILLSET

- Extensive experience designing, building, and evolving production data platforms, including at least one significant modernization or migration from a legacy architecture

- Deep expertise in modern data architectures and the trade-offs among cloud data warehouses, lakehouses, batch and streaming systems, orchestration frameworks, transformation tooling, and event-driven architectures

- Experience evaluating and working with technologies such as Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, dbt, Kafka, or comparable platforms

- Strong command of data architecture principles, including data modeling, storage and compute architecture, governance, lineage, security, reliability, and cost management

- Expert-level SQL and strong proficiency in Python or a comparable language, with the ability and inclination to remain hands-on

- Working familiarity with the Microsoft data stack-including MSSQL, SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, and Power BI-sufficient to understand existing workloads and design a pragmatic migration path

- Experience establishing engineering standards around infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, testing, observability, and data quality

- Demonstrated technical leadership, including mentoring experienced engineers, driving architectural decisions, and building consensus across teams with competing requirements

- Sound judgment around architectural trade-offs, build-versus-buy decisions, vendor selection, and production change risk

- Ability to communicate complex architectural decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

WHAT TO EXPECT AS A PRINCIPAL DATA ENGINEER

Within 1 month , you will understand our existing data environment, the systems that feed it, and the teams that depend on it. You will work directly with traders, risk, finance, operations, and technology leadership to understand our highest-value data use cases, current limitations, and long-term objectives.

Within 3 months , you will have assessed our existing data landscape and established the target architecture for our next-generation platform, including technology selections, build-versus-buy decisions, migration strategy, and implementation sequencing. Working alongside our Senior Data Engineers, you will validate the architecture against real workloads, establish engineering standards, and begin putting the first components into production.

Within 6 months , you will have production workloads operating on the new platform and a repeatable pattern for migrating additional datasets, pipelines, and reporting workloads. You will be leading the technical direction of the data engineering team, developing the engineers around you, and partnering with technology and business leadership on the longer-term roadmap for data at Group One.

THE BENEFITS

Our Principal Data Engineer earns a competitive salary, including a performance-based bonus. We provide fantastic benefits, including 401(k) and Roth 401(k) retirement plans with employer matching, medical, dental, vision, generous vacation time, paid holidays, parental leave, and flexible spending accounts (FSA) for health care, dependent daycare, and parking or mass transit expenses.

If this sounds like the right opportunity for you, apply today! Please fill out our initial 3-minute, mobile-friendly application for the Principal Data Engineer role. We look forward to meeting you!