Position Overview
The Principal Data Engineer at Viewport reports to the Head of Technology and is part of the technology leadership team. You will be responsible for leading the management and successful execution of the data and reporting teams at Viewport. You will collaborate with the Head of Technology, Enterprise Architect (head of R&D), and Product Management, specifically the Product Owner, to balance quarterly objectives, capacity allocation, and delivery.
The Principal Data Engineer is the team leader responsible for all matters related to data and reporting including, but not limited to, research and development, software development and maintenance, and data and reporting systems and their uptime. You are responsible for the overall data architecture and solution deployment. You will establish processes and structures for managing data from various inputs, routing, and storage forms.
The individual leading the data and reporting teams should showcase proven skills in leading and coaching a team of engineers within a dynamic setting, characterized by numerous concurrent variables. This necessitates a capacity to balance technical architecture, implementation, and team coaching that lead to consistent and replicable growth of our website portfolio and internal tools.
As the Principal Data Engineer you will contribute code while developing and leading the team that owns the design and development of the data and reporting technology which is critical to the success of our technology platform used to impact millions of consumers per day. You should be able to partner with business leaders to envision, plan, and execute technology solutions to meet enterprise needs. You will build a team focused on achieving business outcomes. You should be both a strong people and technology leader, have excellent operational execution and take ownership, and be able to lead a team to bring new ideas to reality. You should value simplicity and scale, work comfortably in a collaborative and agile environment, and be excited to learn.
Job Responsibilities
- Management of all dev, staging, and production systems that support data infrastructure and reporting. This is measured by uptime for production systems and the amount of time developers spend managing their environment versus doing actual development work.
- Ensuring that systems and vendor capacity are in place to meet the business’s annual and quarterly growth plans. This is measured by operations being able to deliver planned volumes of traffic without technical systems capacity limitations.
- Ensure that operational treatment and security audit processes around consumer data, with emphasis on PII, meet the compliance requirements as set by the General Counsel. Ensure that the Head of Technology is aware when there are risks to this compliance.
- Support planning in partnership with product management to ensure that annual and quarterly objectives are attainable and properly resourced (with 100% goal completion being aspirational and par being regular improvement versus the previous quarter).
- Management of the data and reporting development pipeline as measured by task and project completion versus plan (with 100% completion being aspirational and par being regular improvement versus the previous quarter).
- Actively support Product Management and Product Development leaders by researching off-the-shelf solutions and components to ensure we don’t constantly reinvent the wheel. This is measured by the lack of growth in commodity proprietary technologies (and removal of some currently in place).
- Ensure that everyone in your organization has a career/skills development plan that is evaluated bi-annually as evidenced by completed timely reviews.
- Implement and ensure appropriate standards for knowledge base documentation, end-user documentation and incident response documentation as measured by developing an outline of needed documentation then achieving a higher documentation completion rate each quarter.
- Research and Development:
- Work with the head of R&D to anticipate forthcoming viable new technologies that support the business as measured by plans are in place to accept hand-off of prototype technologies for use in production including clear requirements for hand-off from R&D.
- Work with the head of R&D to specify areas where product and technology are experiencing ambiguous requirements and/or problems with unknown solutions as measured by clear requests are made to the R&D team when needs arise.
- Ensure that the R&D-related activities are supported by Systems and Uptime as measured by developer time spent working on their environment versus doing development work.
Candidate Profile
- 3+ years experience managing engineering teams (mentoring, hiring, and performance management).
- Demonstrated ability to recruit for and form new engineering teams as well as collaborating across multiple teams in distributed geographies and timezones.
- 7+ years experience in modern large-scale design patterns.
- Experience working in an Agile Team and acting as Scrum Master.
- 3+ years experience in one or more modern data technology stacks - AWS Athena, Firebolt, Clickhouse, AWS Glue, Upsolver, Apache Spark, AWS Kinesis, Kafka, etc.
- 3+ years experience with modern devops and data change management - Github, Github Actions, dbt, terraform, etc.
- Understands mechanics of email deliverability and the data that drives it.
- Experience with monitoring and alerting tools - Datadog, New Relic, etc.
Top 3 Skills in the Ideal Candidate
- Leadership of Data Engineering teams with 3+ engineers.
- 5+ years experience operating high-volume transaction systems.
- Experience leading a data engineering team including product ideation and iteration, solving for real business needs.
What we offer:
- This is a fully remote job and offers great flexibility, but you must be located in the United States. All of our employees work remotely and you will be working and collaborating with teammates from the East Coast to the West Coast.
- This is a full-time position. The majority of your work will occur during core business hours. We understand that the best employees have full lives - that may mean that they are raising children, coordinating the use of shared space with a spouse or partner, taking care of elderly parents, or whatever else is going on in your life.
- Compensation will be commensurate with aptitude and experience, but the company historically pays at the top of local market rates.
- We provide exceptional benefits:
- 100% employer-paid health, dental and vision insurance (that means we offer multiple insurance plans that we pay 100% of the premiums for you PLUS your dependents and your cost is $0!)
- 401(k) retirement savings plan with employer match
- Health Savings and Flexible Spending Accounts
- Short-term disability, long-term disability and life insurance fully paid by the company
- All full-time employees participate in a monthly profit sharing bonus program
- 12 weeks of fully-paid maternity leave, 4 weeks for non-birthing partners
- 19 Paid Holidays
- Fully paid sabbaticals with enrichment stipends after each 5 years of employment
About Viewport
Viewport is the result of a recent combination of StichedIn, a digital publisher serving general interest content to millions of users daily, and FourLeaf, a massive real-time data provider with visibility into consumer activity at U.S. adult population scale. We bring together core competencies of producing and distributing content Americans want and need, massive real-time consumer data and email channel dominance, and advertising partnerships so that our customers can expose their message to our audiences. By the numbers, we’re the biggest brand in digital publishing you’ve never heard of. Yet.
Applicants must have legal authorization to work in the United States. Work will be remote with regular hours and meetings throughout the week, with out-of-hours work occasionally as needed.
We are an equal opportunity employer that welcomes all qualified applicants without discrimination on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any non-merit based or legally protected grounds.
BEWARE OF SCAMS: candidates should only respond to @theviewport.com emails and messages on our official platform accounts.
