Principal Data Engineer

Ledgebrook is building an Excess & Surplus lines insurance company that combines underwriting and pricing expertise with a modern technology platform. The Principal Data Engineer will set the technical direction for the data platform, own its architecture and standards, and drive data initiatives across engineering, actuarial, finance, product, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

Responsibilities:

• Architect the Data Platform – Own the end-to-end design of our data infrastructure. Make the foundational calls on pipeline architecture, data modeling patterns, and platform evolution across Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, and Terraform
• Define Engineering Standards – Establish and enforce practices around data quality, testing, observability, and deployment that the rest of the team builds on. Your patterns become the defaults
• Enable Data-Driven Decisions at Scale – Design semantic layers and data models complex enough to support underwriting, finance, and executive strategy. Simple enough that analysts can use them without hand-holding
• Drive Data Governance – Own the governance posture: data contracts, SLAs, lineage, and documentation. Make trusted data a property of the system, not a manual effort
• Shape the ML and AI Foundation – Partner with data science and engineering leadership to ensure the platform supports advanced analytics, ML pipelines, and AI initiatives
• Elevate the Team – Mentor engineers, conduct rigorous code and design reviews, and actively close skill gaps. Your leverage is measured in part by how much better the people around you get
• Partner at the Leadership Level – Engage directly with actuarial, underwriting, finance, and product leaders to translate business complexity into technical roadmap. You're a peer to stakeholders, not a ticket-taker

Requirements:

• • 10+ years of experience in data engineering or analytics engineering
• • Expert-level command of Python and SQL, with a history of production systems that others maintain and build on
• • Deep hands-on experience with Airflow, dbt, Terraform, and Snowflake (or equivalents) in production environments
• • Demonstrated ability to own platform architecture decisions end-to-end: design, tradeoffs, delivery, and iteration
• • Track record of driving cross-functional alignment on technical direction without relying on positional authority
• • Experience building and enforcing data quality, observability, and governance frameworks at scale
• • Comfort operating in high-ambiguity environments where you define the path, not just walk it
• Please note: This position is open only to candidates who are authorized to work in the United States or Canada without the need for current or future employer-sponsored work authorization. We are unable to offer sponsorship at this time.
• Please note: This position is open only to candidates who are authorized to work in Poland without the need for current or future employer-sponsored work authorization. We are unable to offer sponsorship at this time.
• • Experience in insurance, fintech, or other regulated domains
• • Familiarity with Power BI, Tableau, Looker, or other BI tools
• • Experience designing for compliance and data governance requirements (SOC 2, CCPA, etc.)
• • Prior experience building data infrastructure at a high-growth startup for growth stage