Principal Data Engineer at Recorded Future
Boston, MA
$152,000–$228,500from the description
Jul 27, 2026
Boston, MA
Jul 29, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A Principal Data Engineer role within Recorded Future's Digital Risk Protection department, focused on building and owning production-grade data pipelines, APIs, and ETL/ELT systems that ingest and analyze digital risk data streams at scale. The position involves cross-team collaboration to achieve data convergence across DRP systems and the Intelligence Graph, and includes mentoring direct reports and leading technical project execution.
Senior level · 5+ years · Remote · 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 180 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (database architects). range 110–320
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
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). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 29, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (5)
The posting lists Kafka/RabbitMQ, MongoDB, graph databases (AWS Neptune/Neo4j), cloud computing tools, and Elasticsearch together under a single '3+ years' experience bullet in the requirements section — all are treated as hard gates. Cloud computing tools are mentioned but no specific platform is named, so no separate cloud skill was emitted.
Argo CD, Kubernetes, Prefect, LLMs, REST APIs (Flask/Django/FastAPI), and statistical techniques all appear under a 'Preferred experience' or narrative framing section and are marked accordingly.
The role mentions 'mentor direct reports,' suggesting some people-management responsibility, but the posting is primarily scoped around hands-on data engineering ownership and technical leadership rather than a pure management role — classified as a data/engineering IC role rather than 11-3021.
The title says 'Principal' but the requirements (5+ years Python, 3+ years tooling) and scope are more consistent with a Senior-level role; advertised seniority reflects the title claim.
No specific work location is stated; the salary range is described as covering 'all US locations,' suggesting a remote-US or location-flexible role.
Read the full posting
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