Principal Software Engineer
•Skimmer· 1d
💻 Engineering⏰ Full-time🎯 Lead / Principal🇺🇸 USA
1d ago
Tax & Compliance·3 months ago
At Airalo, we're making it easier for people to stay connected wherever they travel. As the world's first eSIM store, we help millions of travelers access affordable mobile data in 200+ countries and regions around the world.
Today, we're a team of 400+ people across 60+ countries, building a product used by travelers every day. We've grown quickly, but we've worked hard to keep what matters: trust, ownership, and the freedom for people to do great work without unnecessary layers or bureaucracy.
We're fully remote by design, genuinely global, and united by a shared mission to make travel simpler for everyone.
Curious what it's actually like to work at Airalo? We've put together a guide for each of the hubs we hire from most, covering our benefits, remote culture, employment setup, and what our team values most:
As the Data Engineering Manager, you will lead the foundational backend of our data organization. You will directly manage our current pod of Data Engineers (2 Senior Data Engineers and 1 Customer Data Platform Engineer) and shape the hiring roadmap as the function grows - including scoping future specialized roles such as Machine Learning Engineers.
Partnering closely with the Data Director, you will help us transition out of the reactive, ad-hoc phase and into a structured, highly scalable data ecosystem. You will own the architecture, ingestion, and orchestration that powers the rest of the data team - ensuring that our Analytics Engineers, Data Analysts and other users have a rock-solid, high-quality foundation to build upon.
This role goes beyond building a data platform. You'll be the connective tissue between Product & Engineering, MarTech, and our partner ecosystem - ensuring data is produced cleanly at the source, captured reliably, and delivered cohesively across the entire organization.
Manage, mentor, and grow a team of senior Data Engineers and CDP Engineers, building a culture of engineering excellence and continuous learning.
Drive hiring for the function as it grows, including scoping future specialised roles such as Machine Learning Engineers.
Own the DE delivery roadmap — sequencing, prioritisation, trade-offs — in partnership with senior ICs who lead technical direction. Lead delivery of major cross-functional programs as the named DE owner.
Represent Data Engineering to the rest of the org — Product, Engineering, Marketing, Finance, and executive stakeholders. Translate between business priorities and engineering reality in both directions, and partner closely with Software Engineering and MarTech on the shared boundary between Data and the rest of the platform.
Transition the team's workflow from reactive problem-solving to structured, predictable delivery.
Champion high standards on pipeline reliability, observability, data quality, privacy, and governance — owning the prioritisation and follow-through while senior ICs lead the technical implementation.
Roll up your sleeves where it helps the team move — complex code reviews, unblocking hard problems, or stepping into hands-on work directly.
Act as a strategic partner to the Analytics Engineering Manager and Data Director on the foundations needed for our self-serve analytics ambition and the broader data vision.
7+ years of professional experience as a Data/Software Engineer, with at least 2+ years of experience directly managing and scaling data engineering teams.
You thrive in low-maturity or greenfield data environments. You're comfortable navigating ambiguity and enjoy the process of laying down paved roads and engineering standards where none existed before.
Deep, hands-on background with major cloud platforms (GCP preferred) and cloud-native data warehouses (BigQuery preferred, or Snowflake/Redshift).
Strong experience with orchestration tools (Airflow, Dagster), ELT pipelines (Fivetran, dbt), and distributed data processing frameworks (Apache Spark, Flink).
Hands-on experience using AI tools to accelerate engineering workflows - code generation, code review, pipeline debugging, or documentation
Strong coding experience in Python (and/or Scala) and advanced SQL across relational and non-relational databases.
Experience implementing CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and observability/monitoring for data pipelines.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, Information Systems, or a related quantitative field.
Experience implementing data contracts, data catalogues (Atlan, Amundsen, DataHub), or federated governance models.
Experience with Customer Data Platforms (Segment, mParticle, or similar), MarTech data integration, and real-time event processing.
Experience in marketplace, B2C, or high-volume transactional businesses.
Previous work in globally distributed data environments (multi-currency, multi-region, multi-language).
Experience building or contributing to experimentation platform infrastructure (A/B testing pipelines, feature flag data, experiment analysis frameworks).
Exposure to Machine Learning infrastructure - not necessarily building models, but scoping teams, tooling, and pipelines that support ML workloads.
We started Airalo to make staying connected effortless, wherever you are in the world. Today, millions of travelers rely on our eSIMs, and many of the people building the product were customers first.
Our team is united by a shared belief that great work happens when people are trusted to own what they do. As Airalo continues to grow, so do the opportunities to learn, take on new challenges, and make a real impact.
For many of our teammates in Spain, it's the combination of stability, flexibility, and genuine work-life balance that makes Airalo feel like home.
We started Airalo to make staying connected effortless, wherever you are in the world. Today, millions of travelers rely on our eSIMs, and many of the people building the product first discovered us as customers.
Our team spans 60+ countries, but what people often notice quickly is how work actually feels here. There's trust to own what you do, space to focus without constant layers of process, and a clear sense of what you're responsible for from day one.
As Airalo continues to grow, people tend to stay for a mix of things: the chance to work on a product used globally, the autonomy to shape how they work, and the opportunity to keep taking on new challenges without getting stuck in one lane.