Principal Software Engineer, Data Products
Summary
Principal-level individual contributor in Fetch's Data organization building the software behind its shopper-data ad business: audience creation/scoring/delivery, repeatable measurement pipelines, and partner-facing APIs and services. Hands-on backend and architecture work plus technical leadership; role can be held remotely in the US or from a US office.
- Own technical direction and delivery. Define the architecture and implementation approach for a significant area of Fetch’s off-platform data business. Lead work from problem definition and proof of concept through production delivery and ongoing improvement.
- Build and operate production software. Design, implement, and maintain the services, APIs, and processing workflows behind our data products. Work with Core Data Platform to build on shared ingestion, storage, orchestration, and trusted data assets. Establish clear interfaces and ownership so product teams can extend these capabilities without duplicating foundational infrastructure
- Turn evolving needs into concrete solutions. Partner with Product, Sales, and external partners to clarify requirements, test assumptions, and translate feedback into practical engineering decisions.
- Make sound architectural tradeoffs. Balance delivery speed, scalability, reliability, and maintainability, choosing solutions appropriate to the product’s stage and partner commitments.
- Bring data science into production. Partner with data scientists to turn audience models and measurement methods into reliable software. Build repeatable data preparation, scoring, evaluation, and delivery workflows, with clear versioning, monitoring, and recovery mechanisms. Jointly define production acceptance criteria, balancing scientific validity, partner requirements, runtime, and cost.
- Improve data quality and reliability. Build validation, monitoring, and operational safeguards that help ensure accurate, dependable outputs and meet agreed partner service levels.
- Lead through technical influence. Align engineers and cross-functional partners on design decisions, resolve dependencies, and guide implementation across the teams contributing to your domain.
- Raise the engineering bar. Mentor engineers, provide thoughtful design and code reviews, and establish patterns that help a growing team build and operate these systems effectively.
- 15+ years of software engineering experience, including setting technical strategy, leading architectural decisions across organizations, and driving initiatives with company-level impact.
- Demonstrated ownership of a data-intensive product from an ambiguous problem or prototype through production launch and sustained customer or partner use. You can explain the architectural decisions you made, what changed after launch, and how you measured reliability, adoption, and business value
- A track record of building and operating production software, with direct ownership of consequential architectural decisions and delivery outcomes.
- Experience building advertising platforms, audience products, measurement or attribution systems, demand-side platforms, or closely related data products.
- Strong software engineering fundamentals, including system design, backend development, testing, and production operations.
- Experience designing systems that process substantial volumes of data, with an understanding of data quality, performance, reliability, and operational tradeoffs.
- Demonstrated technical leadership of complex initiatives involving multiple engineers or teams, including setting direction, guiding implementation, and resolving technical disagreements.
- The ability to move work forward when requirements are incomplete, form informed technical opinions, and adjust your approach as new evidence emerges.
- Strong product judgment and the ability to connect technical decisions to partner needs, product adoption, and business outcomes.
- Clear communication with technical and nontechnical stakeholders, including the ability to explain trade-offs and challenge requirements constructively.
- Experience bringing machine learning models into production in partnership with Data Science.
- Familiarity with audience expansion, lookalike modeling, or predictive systems used in advertising.
- Knowledge of statistics, anomaly detection, or techniques for identifying and addressing data quality issues.
- Experience integrating data products with advertising platforms or external partners.
SoftBank Vision Fund