Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Sovrn is a Software and Data business that helps Open Web businesses be and remain independent. They are seeking a Principal Data Engineer to own the design and evolution of data platform systems, lead architectural decisions, and establish AI engineering practices across the team.
Responsibilities
- Own the design and evolution of data platform systems that operate at exchange scale; high throughput, real-time streaming, and always-on batch pipelines
- Lead architectural decisions across data infrastructure: pipeline design, data modeling, lakehouse architecture, and data services layers
- Specify data platform components and configurations required for pipeline implementation; define pipeline observability to understand and improve performance at massive scale
- Research, implement, and evolve methods to process and democratize data across the organization
- Drive technical standards, design reviews, and engineering best practices across a senior team
- Partner with product, data science, and platform teams to ship end-to-end
- Establish and champion AI engineering practices across the team, from prompt engineering and RAG patterns to agentic workflow design, LLM evaluation, and progressive implementation of agentic design patterns
- Identify high-leverage opportunities to apply AI in our data stack: intelligent pipeline optimization, anomaly detection, automated data quality, forecasting, and LLM-powered data services
- Lead the evolution of our existing LLM and agentic tooling from passive use to intentional, well-architected integration within our data platform
- Set standards for how we evaluate, trust, and operate AI-powered systems in production, including observability, fallback behavior, and model governance
- Help the broader engineering team build fluency and confidence with AI tooling, not just tolerance of it
- Provide domain expertise across the organization to enable business growth through data services and data models
- Provide counsel to all consumers and stakeholders of data to enable efficient and impactful use of our data assets
- Mentor and level up engineers through code review, design collaboration, and hands-on guidance; foster a culture of innovation and continuous learning
- Operate with high autonomy across ambiguous, high-impact problems
Skills
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong data engineering and backend track record
- 5+ years working specifically in adtech data infrastructure, SSP, DSP, exchange, or ad server environments
- Deep fluency in the programmatic ecosystem: OpenRTB, bid request/response flows, auction mechanics, supply path optimization, or similar
- Excellent understanding of real-time streaming and batch pipelines, big data, and data lakes; hands-on experience in distributed data processing in the AWS ecosystem
- Strong understanding of second-layer big data platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks, applicable use cases, best practices, implementation, and support considerations
- Strong experience in structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data techniques; metadata management, data lineage, and data governance
- Experience with data security and compliance (PII, CCPA, GDPR, etc.)
- Demonstrated experience leading AI or agentic engineering efforts in production environments; not just experimentation, but shipped, operated, and iterated on
- Hands-on experience with LLM integration patterns: RAG, vector DBs, tool use, multi-step agentic workflows, prompt engineering, and evaluation frameworks
- Ability to clearly document and communicate architectural concepts at multiple levels; ability to lead problem definition, solution designs, and implementation work plans
- Understanding of DevOps and SRE practices
- Comfort driving technical decisions in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
- A point of view on where AI is and isn't the right too, and the credibility to make that case
Benefits
- Bonus
- Equity
- Benefits
- Stock options
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage
- Short and long-term disability
- Life insurance
- 11 paid holidays
- Flexible vacation
- Commuter benefits
- A 401(k) plan and match
- A paid parental leave program
Company Overview
OnScroll was acquired by Sovrn in 2016. It was founded in 2012, and is headquartered in London, England, GBR, with a workforce of 201-500 employees. Its website is http://www.OnScroll.com.