Principal Data Engineer

Location: Boston, MA / Remote

Department: Platform Engineering

Beacon Biosignals is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to join our Datastore team. The Datastore sits at the heart of Beacon's platform. It defines our foundational data model and serves as the centralized repository and API for brain data collected from clinical studies, supporting the analytical tools, services, and applications used by our scientists, clinicians, and partners.

This role emphasizes the architecture and design of solutions spanning the Beacon Platform, with a focus on scalable data models to serve expanding business needs, event-driven pipelines, and engineering best practices. You will coach engineers and stakeholders of the Datastore on design patterns, collaborate with product and technical leads across platform and scientific teams, and help shape architectural direction and standards across Platform teams.

Beacon's robust asynchronous work practices ensure a first-class remote work experience, but we also have in-person office hubs available located in Boston, New York and Paris. This role is fully remote working anywhere in the US.

What success looks like

• You partner with engineering and product leaders and Datastore stakeholders to guide architecture and solutions for the Beacon Datastore, and influence architectural standards across Platform teams
• You implement features that model best practices, and coach team members to develop their skills. You hold the Datastore to ever higher standards for data integrity, design soundness, and maintainability as it grows
• You draft RFCs to lead complex feature discovery and technical design phases, soliciting and incorporating input and building alignment on the decisions that guide development

What you will bring

• 10+ years of backend development experience, including significant experience focused on data engineering, data platforms, and infrastructure for data-centric applications
• Strong proficiency in SQL, with production experience working with PostgreSQL
• Proficiency with data streaming and event processing, using tools such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, Pulsar, or a cloud-based equivalent like Amazon Kinesis
• Strong proficiency in a modern general-purpose language; proficiency in the Datastore's specific stack (SQL/TypeScript/Julia) is not required, but you should be able and excited to learn quickly!
• Experience with, or interest in, using LLM-assisted or agentic coding tools in a production setting, with good judgment about what guardrails are needed
• Experience deploying and operating services in containerized environments, with familiarity in Kubernetes and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform and/or Helm
• A collaborative mindset - you enjoy working across disciplines and believe people achieve more together than alone
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially in asynchronous and remote-friendly environments

We don't expect every candidate to check every box. If you bring strong fundamentals, care about data infrastructure for health, and are excited to learn, we’d love to hear from you!

The salary range for this role is $190,000 – $210,000. Salary ranges are determined using current market compensation data for this role and adjusted based on experience, skills, and location.The base salary is one component of the total compensation package, which includes equity, PTO, and other benefits.

At Beacon, we've found that cultural and scientific impact is driven most by those that lead by example. As such, we're always seeking new contributors whose work demonstrates an avid curiosity, a bias towards simplicity, an eye for composability, a self-service mindset, and - most of all - a deep empathy towards colleagues, stakeholders, users, and patients. We believe a diverse team builds more robust systems and achieves higher impact.