Principal Data Engineer

The salary range for this role is $170K-$250K per year.

About Sezzle:

With a mission to financially empower the next generation, Sezzle is revolutionizing the shopping experience beyond payments, blending cutting-edge tech with seamless, interest-free installment plans that make shopping smarter and more accessible. We’re not just transforming payments; we’re redefining how people discover, interact with, and purchase the things they love while driving real impact on merchant sales through increased conversions and higher order values. As we continue to shape the future of fintech and retail, we’re building an innovative, dynamic team passionate about creating more than just a transaction but a truly unique shopping journey. If you’re excited about pushing boundaries in tech and delivering a game-changing experience for consumers and merchants alike, come join us at Sezzle and help create the future of shopping!

About the Role: 

We are seeking a talented and motivated, best-in-class Principal Data Engineer. 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.

Compensation:

The compensation range for the role is $170K-$250K USD OTE including base and variable. Our ranges are very broad to accommodate all types of candidates and encourage growth. Specific compensation offered to a candidate may be dependent on factors such as education, experience, qualifications, and alignment with market data. Exceptional candidates may receive salaries outside of the posted ranges.

What you’ll do: 

• 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.

What We look for: 

• 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.

Preferred Knowledge and Skills:

• Prior experience in high-growth, data-intensive fintech or similar regulated environments.
• Familiarity with streaming technologies (Kafka, Kinesis, Flink, Spark Streaming).
• Knowledge of lakehouse architectures and modern stacks such as Snowflake, Databricks, Iceberg, or Delta Lake.
• Exposure to machine learning pipelines, feature stores, or MLOps concepts.
• Experience leading data platform migrations, warehouse re-architectures, or large-scale performance overhauls.
• Enthusiasm for automation, CI/CD for data, and infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation).

About You: 

• 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.

What Makes Working at Sezzle Awesome? 

At Sezzle, we are more than just brilliant engineers, passionate data enthusiasts, out-of-the-box thinkers, and determined innovators; we are skilled musicians, yogis, cyclists, chefs, golfers, dog-lovers, and rock-climbers. We believe in surrounding ourselves with not only the best and the brightest individuals, but those that are unique and purpose-driven in all that they do. Our culture is not defined by a certain set of perks designed to give the illusion of the traditional startup culture, but rather, it is the visible example living in every employee that we hire.

 Perks & Benefits: 

• Unlimited PTO, volunteer hours and sabbatical 
• Life, STD/LTD, medical, dental and vision insurance 
• Highly discounted LifeTime gym membership
• 401k with match
• Collaborative fun co-workers
• The opportunity to join the fastest growing FinTech alongside a team of motivated and driven individuals

CCPA Disclosure: Sezzle Inc. is committed to protecting the privacy of our job applicants. In compliance with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), we inform California residents about the personal information we may collect, the purposes for its collection, and your rights under the CCPA. For details about the categories of personal information we collect and your rights under the CCPA, please visit the California Office of the Attorney General's CCPA page. By submitting your application, you acknowledge that you have read and understood this CCPA disclosure.

Equal Employment Opportunity: Sezzle Inc. is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other legally protected status. Sezzle recognizes and values the importance of diversity and inclusion in enriching the employment experience of its employees and in supporting our mission.

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