Principal SWE – Data Lake & Open Source at Fivetran in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
A High-Impact Principal Role at a $5.6B Data Infrastructure Leader
This is a Principal-level position — one of the most senior individual contributor tracks in engineering. At a company valued at $5.6B (Series D stage), this role sits at an inflection point: established enough to have serious infrastructure, but still moving fast enough for technical decisions to matter at scale.
Compensation context: No salary range is listed, which is a minor yellow flag for transparency. Principal Software Engineers in Germany at late-stage startups typically earn €130,000–€180,000+ base, often supplemented by RSU grants. RSUs at Fivetran's valuation carry real upside if a liquidity event (IPO or acquisition) occurs.
Skills this role develops:
- Cutting-edge open table formats: Apache Iceberg, Delta Lake, Polaris — among the hottest skills in the modern data stack right now.
- DuckDB contributions — open-source credibility and community visibility.
- Multi-cloud architecture (AWS, GCP, Azure) at planetary scale.
- Technical leadership: setting architecture direction and influencing cross-functional teams.
Green flags: Open-source contribution baked into the job, access to bleeding-edge lakehouse technology, strong company brand in data engineering circles, mental health and parental leave benefits signal a maturing culture.
Watch for: No salary transparency, and the MS/PhD preference may indicate a highly academic culture with a high performance bar. Ensure you clarify team size, on-call expectations, and the ratio of greenfield vs. maintenance work in interviews.
From Fivetran's founding until now, our mission has remained the same: to make access to data as simple and reliable as electricity. With Fivetran, customer data arrives in their warehouses, canonical and ready to query, with no engineering or maintenance required. We're proud that more organizations continue to leverage our technology every day to become truly data-driven.
About the Role
Fivetran is building data pipelines to power the modern data stack for thousands of companies.
We're seeking a Principal Software Engineer to contribute to the technical architecture, design and development of Fivetran's Managed Data Lake product offering. As part of a senior engineering team, you'll partner with product and engineering teams to build scalable, high-performance systems, advance open-source technologies, and set technical standards that raise the bar across the organization.
This is a full-time remote position based out of Germany.
Technologies You'll Use
- Java, C++, Postgres, Temporal, gRPC
- AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, Grafana
- Iceberg, Polaris, Delta Lake, Parquet, DuckDB
What You'll Do
- Partner closely with product teams to understand requirements and design cutting-edge new capabilities that go directly into customers' hands.
- Design, develop, implement, and operate highly reliable large-scale data lake systems in cooperation with a dedicated data lake engineering team.
- Contribute to open-source projects such as DuckDB and Polaris.
- Embrace Fivetran innovations with open-source standards and toolsets.
- Analyze fault-tolerance and high availability issues, performance and scale challenges, and solve them.
- Ensure operational excellence of the services and meet commitments to customers regarding security, reliability, availability, and performance.
- Set technical directions and influence cross-functional teams.
Skills We're Looking For
- 6+ years of hands-on or research experience with high-performance relational data management systems.
- Deep understanding of infrastructure & software optimizations and performance engineering to drive significant performance, latency, and availability improvements.
- Proven track record of leading and delivering large and complicated projects.
- Strong development skills in Java and C++.
- Solid experience with public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP).
- Demonstrated knowledge of columnar storage formats.
- Growth mindset and excitement about breaking the status quo by seeking innovative solutions.
- Excellent team player who is consistent in making everyone around you better.
Bonus Skills
- Strongly prefer an MS or PhD in Computer Science, ideally focusing on database management and/or storage engines.
Perks and Benefits
- 100% employer-paid medical insurance*
- Generous paid time-off policy (PTO), plus paid sick time, inclusive parental leave policy, holidays, and volunteer days off
- RSU stock grants*
- Professional development and training opportunities
- Company virtual happy hours, free food, and fun team-building activities
- Monthly cell phone stipend
- Access to an innovative mental health support platform that offers personalized care and resources in areas such as: therapy, coaching, and self-guided mindfulness exercises for all covered employees and their covered dependents.
*May vary by country and worker type — please reach out to your recruiter for more information.
Click here to learn more about Fivetran's Benefits by Region.
We're honored to be valued at over $5.6 billion, but more importantly, we're proud of our core values of Get Stuck In, Do the Right Thing, and One Team, One Dream. Read about us in Forbes.
Fivetran brings together high-quality talent across the globe to make data access as easy and reliable as electricity for our customers. We value and recognize that our customers benefit from having innovative teams made of people from many backgrounds, experiences, and identities. Fivetran promotes diversity, equity, inclusion & belonging through attracting, recruiting, developing, and retaining a diverse workforce, not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it helps us build a world-class company to better serve our customers, our people and our communities.
To learn more about Fivetran's culture and what it's like to be part of the team, click here and enjoy our video.
To learn more about our candidate privacy policy, you can read our statement here.
We are committed to ensuring that all candidates have an equal opportunity to participate in our interview process. If you require accommodations at any stage of the process due to a disability, medical condition, or any other circumstance, please don't hesitate to submit your request by filling out this form. We will work with you to provide reasonable accommodations to facilitate your participation and ensure a fair and accessible interview experience. Your request and any information provided will be kept confidential and will not impact your candidacy. We look forward to hearing from you and accommodating your needs to the best of our ability.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this role truly remote or is there an office requirement in Germany?
What open-source projects will I contribute to in this role?
Is a PhD or Master's degree required for this position?
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