Principal Software Engineer - Data Platform
Principal engineer on Highnote's Data Platform team, designing and building secure, scalable data platforms and pipelines (mostly in Java and Python) to power product/customer data needs and data-driven decisions. Hybrid role based in San Francisco; stack spans Kafka/PubSub/Kinesis, BigQuery/Snowflake, Spanner/Postgres, and AI-assisted development tools.
- Compensation
- $190K–$240K / yr
- Location
- San Francisco, California
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Principal
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 12+ years
- Category
- Data engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 12+ years experience building high volume, low latency data platforms and pipelines using distributed event technology (e.g. Pubsub, Kafka, Kinesis) and data storage systems (e.g. Spanner/Postgres, Bi
- Able to model and design modern data structures in SQL/NoSQL databases
- A history of writing scalable, performant and maintainable code
- Experience with Java >= 11 or Python >= 3.7
- Proficiency using AI-powered development tools (e.g., Claude Code) across the full software development lifecycle, with a demonstrated passion for AI-driven development
Nice to have
- Experience with BigQuery and Snowflake
- Experience with cloud platforms such as GCP or AWS
- Docker and Kubernetes
- Able to model and design modern data structures in data lakes and data warehouses
- A background in the fin-tech space
Full description
About Highnote
Founded in 2020 by a team of leaders from Braintree, PayPal, and Lending Club, Highnote is an embedded finance company that sets the standard in modern card platform management. As an all-in-one card issuer processor and program management platform, we provide digital-first organizations with the flexibility to seamlessly issue and process payment cards, embed virtual and physical card payments, and integrate ledger and wallet functionalities—empowering businesses to drive growth and profitability.
We’ve raised $145M+ and have grown our team to 140+ employees. Headquartered in San Francisco, we’ve managed to build one of the most advanced payments teams in the industry, with team members in 25+ US states.
Operating through our core values of customer obsession, executional excellence, intentional inclusion, we’re helping businesses grow for the future by creating the payment products demanded by tomorrow, with the ability to solve for use cases that don’t exist yet.
We are fast-moving, hands-on, and strongly believe everyone deserves a seat at the table. We believe we’re unlocking incredible opportunities that can change the future of payments, as long as we have the right people to make it happen.
Job Description
The Data Platform Team is part of the Data Organization and is responsible for designing and building modern scalable, secure and reliable data platforms and data pipelines. With the data platforms, we will be able to serve the product/customer data needs, improve operational efficiency and increase revenue.
What you’ll be doing
- Building secure and scalable data platforms that support our product/customer needs and power data driven decision making.
- Writing high quality and robustly tested code, mostly in Java and Python.
- Understanding business/data needs and growth to build the right solutions.
- Documenting your work to support our rapidly-scaling company.
- Interfacing with internal business stakeholders and technology partners to support day to day operations and create new data products.
What we are looking for
- 12+ years experience building high volume and low latency data platform and data pipelines using distributed event technology, e.g. Pubsub, Kafka, Kinesis, etc., and data storage system, e.g. Spanner/Postgres, BigQuery, Cassandra, data lakes, etc.
- Preferred experience with BigQuery and Snowflake.
- Able to model and design modern data structures in SQL/NoSQL databases
- A history of writing scalable, performant and maintainable code
- Experience with Java >= 11 or Python >= 3.7