Lead Data Enginer

Lead Data Engineer (Principal-Level) • 4 days a week on site in Los Angeles (flexible start/end times if needed) • The company has a free gym on site and a modern office that includes outdoor workspaces. • Must be a U.S. citizen or Green Card Holder Los Angeles, CA (Hybrid – 4 days onsite) We’re partnering with a fast-growing, mid-size product-driven company that’s investing heavily in modern data infrastructure, AI, and self-service analytics. This is a high-impact, principal-level role where you’ll operate at the intersection of data architecture, business strategy, and hands-on engineering—owning the evolution of their data platform and helping the business actually use data to make decisions. The Opportunity This is not a heads-down execution role. You’ll step in as the technical and strategic leader of the data function, balancing a team of strong executors with architecture, stakeholder alignment, and business-facing leadership. The company is currently running a split data environment (Snowflake + BigQuery) and is about to undergo a major consolidation into Snowflake on AWS, followed by a full dbt implementation to enable a scalable, self-service analytics model. You’ll own that transformation. What You’ll Own • Lead the migration from a fragmented data stack (BigQuery + Snowflake) into a unified Snowflake (AWS) environment • Architect and implement dbt from the ground up to support scalable, governed data modeling • Design clean, business-ready data models that drive decision-making across teams • Partner directly with executives, product, and business stakeholders to translate needs into data solutions • Establish source-of-truth frameworks and eliminate conflicting metrics across systems • Guide best practices across data modeling, transformation, and documentation • Support a shift toward self-service analytics + AI-driven workflows • Collaborate with engineering on data pipelines, performance, and scalability • Act as the bridge between technical teams and the business What Makes This Role Different • Highly visible, business-facing (not just backend engineering) • You’ll balance a team of strong IC executors who need architectural direction • Opportunity to own a full data platform transformation • Company is actively embracing AI tooling (including Claude and similar)—they want someone who leans into it, not against it • Real opportunity to shape how the company uses data at scale What They’re Looking For Must-Have Technical Experience • Strong experience with: • Snowflake (required) • AWS (required) • dbt (or deep transformation-layer experience) • Experience designing and scaling modern data warehouse architectures • Strong SQL + Python for scripting and data workflows • Experience working across multi-source, complex data environments Leadership & Business Skills (Critical) • Proven ability to work directly with stakeholders and business leaders • Strong communication and data storytelling skills • Ability to translate messy business problems into clean data solutions • Experience acting as a technical lead, architect, or principal-level IC • Comfortable balancing strategy with hands-on execution Nice to Have • Experience with BigQuery (migration context) • Exposure to AI tools (Claude, LLM workflows, etc.) • Background in building self-service analytics ecosystems