Principal Data Engineer, Sezzle

• 10+ years of experience in data engineering, with a strong track record of building and scaling production-grade systems
• Deep expertise with AWS Redshift or similar products, including performance tuning, table design, and workload management
• Strong hands-on experience with ETL/ELT frameworks, especially DBT, AWS DMS, or similar tools
• Proficiency in SQL (advanced level) and at least one programming language such as Python, Scala, or Java
• Experience building and maintaining AWS-based data platforms, including S3, Lambda, Glue, or EMR
• Track record designing scalable, fault-tolerant data pipelines using modern orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, etc.) processing more than 100GB - 1 TB of new data a day
• Strong understanding of data modeling, distributed systems, and warehouse/lake design patterns
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, collaborative environment with excellent communication and documentation skills
• You have relentlessly high standards - many people may think your standards are unreasonably high. You are continually raising the bar and driving those around you to deliver great results. You make sure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed
• You’re not bound by convention - your success—and much of the fun—lies in developing new ways to do things
• You need action - speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking
• You earn trust - you listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully
• You have backbone; disagree, then commit - you can respectfully challenge decisions when you disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. You have conviction and are tenacious. You do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, you commit wholly
• You deliver results - you focus on the key inputs and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, you rise to the occasion and never settle

Desirable

• This role presents an exciting opportunity to thrive in a dynamic, fast-paced environment within a rapidly growing team, with abundant prospects for career advancement
• Sezzle is growing; our data generation and consumption is growing with us at an increasing scale
• Data is extremely valuable, and we want to empower the business, the engineers, and the rest of the organization to be able to analyze large volumes of it quickly and efficiently
• Sezzle is a heavy consumer of Redshift, leveraging AWS DMS, DBT-based Transformations, and similar tooling to populate a rapidly growing data lake that supports multiple data warehouses for other business units
• It’s scaled well with us so far, and we’re looking to continue improving it, but we also want to step into new tooling and technologies
• End to end ownership of our data warehousing infrastructure, its KPIs and its SLAs
• ​​Design, build, and optimize large-scale, high-performance data pipelines to support analytics, product insights, and operational workflows
• Architect and evolve Sezzle’s data ecosystem, driving improvements in reliability, scalability, and efficiency
• Help Sezzle evolve our data systems beyond the current scale and stack with whatever tooling is necessary to handle processing high volumes of events and performing complex ETL
• Lead development of ETL/ELT workflows on our current tooling using Redshift, DBT, AWS DMS, and related modern data tooling
• Partner with cross-functional teams (engineering, analytics, product, finance, risk) to gather or adapt requirements and deliver robust, high-quality datasets
• Evaluate and integrate new technologies, guiding the evolution of Sezzle’s data stack and infrastructure
• Optimize Redshift and warehouse performance, including query tuning, modeling improvements, and cost management