Principal Data Engineer
Abacus Insights
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Jul 20, 2026
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Jul 22, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior hands-on data engineering role focused on designing and scaling a cloud-based enterprise data platform for healthcare payers. Day-to-day work involves architecting large-scale batch and real-time pipelines, owning integrations across Databricks, Snowflake, and AWS services, leading technical design for client implementations, and mentoring engineering teams. Suits an experienced distributed-systems engineer with deep Python, PySpark, and ETL/ELT expertise and familiarity with healthcare data domains.
Senior level · 7+ years · Remote · Bachelor's required · Full-time
Advertised as Principal, but the requirements read as Senior.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 470 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (database architects). range 200–710
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $142,568 (middle half $111,775–$173,013).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (9)
The role is titled 'Principal Data Engineer' but the actual scope — 7+ years of experience, hands-on pipeline and platform work, mentoring senior and junior engineers — is consistent with a Senior-level individual contributor, not a true org-wide Principal authority. Advertised seniority reflects the title; assessed seniority reflects the requirements.
SOC classification is Medium confidence: the role is primarily about architecting and building large-scale data pipelines and warehousing solutions (15-1243 Database Architects), but the volume of custom code written in Python/PySpark makes 15-1252 Software Developers a credible alternative.
The degree requirement states 'Bachelors or Masters degree' with no equivalent-experience escape clause, so Bachelors is set as the minimum hard requirement.
AWS services (S3, SQS, Lambda, IAM) are listed in the requirements section with 'or equivalent cloud technologies' — AWS is treated as a hard gate with Azure/GCP as alternatives; the individual services are also captured as they are explicitly named.
Airflow is listed alongside 'Databricks Workflows' and 'similar orchestration frameworks' in the requirements block — treated as a hard gate with Databricks Workflows as the named alternative.
Delta Lake, dbt, and Kafka appear under 'Data Platform & Streaming Knowledge' with framing ('experience working with… or event-driven architectures') that reads as a preferred cluster rather than individual hard gates — marked preferred accordingly.
CI/CD and IAM appear in the responsibilities/requirements narrative but without explicit gating language for CI/CD as a standalone skill; IAM is an AWS sub-service listed in context — both marked preferred.
No compensation figures are provided; the posting describes a range based on experience, skills, and location without quoting numbers.
The role is fully remote ('Work from anywhere' listed as a benefit); no specific metro or state is mentioned.
Read the full posting
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