Principal Data Engineer

The posting, as ZoomInfo wrote it

ZoomInfo is where careers accelerate. We move fast, think boldly, and empower you to do the best work of your life. You’ll be surrounded by teammates who care deeply, challenge each other, and celebrate wins. With tools that amplify your impact and a culture that backs your ambition, you won’t just contribute. You’ll make things happen fast.

We are seeking a highly experienced, hands-on Principal Data Engineer to define and evolve the architecture, engineering standards, and operating model for our enterprise data platform.

This role is for a technical leader who excels at complex system design: translating business and analytical needs into scalable, reliable, secure, and maintainable data products. The Principal Data Engineer will lead critical architectural decisions across data ingestion, storage, transformation, orchestration, governance, observability, and consumption, while raising the engineering bar through mentorship, design reviews, and pragmatic best practices.

You will work across engineering, analytics, platform, security, and business stakeholders to create systems that make trusted data accessible, timely, and actionable at scale.

What You’ll Do

Lead Data Architecture and System Design

• Own the technical vision and architecture for scalable, resilient, and cost-effective data platforms and pipelines.
• Design end-to-end data systems spanning batch and streaming ingestion, transformation, data modeling, storage, orchestration, serving layers, and consumption patterns.
• Make and document high-quality architecture decisions, including tradeoffs involving performance, reliability, scalability, latency, security, maintainability, and cost.
• Define reusable architectural patterns for common data engineering challenges, including CDC, event-driven data flows, schema evolution, slowly changing dimensions, data quality, and multi-tenant or domain-oriented data models.
• Establish clear boundaries and interfaces between operational systems, data platforms, analytics layers, and downstream applications.
• Lead technical design reviews for high-impact initiatives and provide clear, constructive direction on implementation approaches.
• Identify architectural risks early and drive plans to mitigate technical debt, single points of failure, data inconsistency, and operational fragility.

Set Engineering Standards and Best Practices

• Establish and continuously improve standards for data engineering development, testing, deployment, documentation, monitoring, incident response, and lifecycle management.
• Define best practices for version-controlled data transformations, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, code review, automated testing, and environment promotion.
• Build a culture of data reliability by implementing standards for data contracts, schema management, lineage, observability, freshness, completeness, accuracy, and reconciliation.
• Champion security, privacy, access control, governance, retention, and compliance r

[…]
. Learn more about ZoomInfo benefits here .

Below is the US base salary for this position. Additional compensation such as Bonus, Commission, Equity and other benefits may also apply.
$171,500 — $269,500 USD

About us

ZoomInfo (NASDAQ: GTM), the all-in-one AI GTM platform, enables sales, marketing, and customer success teams to execute their go-to-market strategy with confidence. Powered by the industry's most comprehensive B2B data, including more than 100 million companies, 500 million contacts, and billions of signals, ZoomInfo delivers the intelligence, automation, and integrations that modern revenue teams need to identify, engage, and convert their best buyers.

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ZoomInfo may use a software-based assessment as part of the recruitment process. More information about this tool, including the results of the most recent bias audit, is available here .

ZoomInfo is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, hiring based on qualifications, merit, and business needs, and does not discriminate based on protected status. We welcome all applicants and are committed to providing equal employment opportunities regardless of sex, race, age, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, disability status, religion, protected military or veteran status, medical condition, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We also consider qualified candidates with criminal histories in accordance with legal requirements.

For Massachusetts Applicants: It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability. ZoomInfo does not administer lie detector tests to applicants in any location.