Principal Data Engineer (m/f/d)

At Ratepay, we are dedicated to revolutionizing the world of digital payments. Established in 2009, we have grown to become Europe's leading white-label Buy Now Pay Later payment provider, processing over 2.5 million transactions per month. Our diverse team of 200+ professionals collaborates to create customized, state-of-the-art payment solutions for major online retailers and marketplaces.     
 
We are building a future-ready domain driven Data warehousing platform that empowers high-impact business domains—Risk, Finance, Commercial, Product, and Compliance—to work with trusted, well-modeled data. Our Data team owns the end-to-end data architecture across ingestion, modeling, quality, and enablement. 
 
As a Principal Data Engineer, you will report directly to the CTO, lead cross-functional data infrastructure efforts, design high-performance pipelines on Snowflake and AWS, enable curated exports from SAP BW via S3, and support company-critical initiatives like banking partnerships and anti-money laundering systems. You will work closely with cloud infrastructure, Finance, Risk, Compliance, and Domain Engineering teams to shape the next stage of our cloud-native data strategy. 
 
Your Key Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the technical architecture of our cloud-native data platform, spanning AWS (S3, IAM, Glue, EC2), Snowflake, Kafka, SAP BW and dbt.
• Partner with business and data stakeholders (Finance, Risk, Product Engineering, Compliance, CSC) to design resilient, auditable, and reusable data flows that power reporting, analytics, and product use cases.
• Own the enablement of curated data sets from SAP BW via OpenHub to S3 and ensure traceability across ingestion, modeling, and exports.
• Define best practices in cost monitoring, FinOps, and CI/CD for data to ensure stability and performance at scale.
• Champion data as a product mindset—modeling, documentation, ownership, and quality metrics that enable real business decisions.
• Mentor senior engineers, act as technical reviewer, and help scale Ratepay’s data engineering maturity across use cases and domains.
• Engage with regulatory and audit needs, enabling data lineage, encryption, and Role Based Access Control (RBAC) in line with BaFin and GDPR expectations.

• Extensive experience designing and scaling data warehousing platforms using technologies like Snowflake, AWS, dbt, Terraform, Airflow, Kafka and CI/CD tools.
• Proven ability to build modular, reusable pipelines with clear separation of concerns across Raw layer, Datalake, and Datamart.
• Familiarity with SAP BW and data extraction via OpenHub, or experience working with regulated ERP systems such as SAP FI and SAP BW.
• Knowledge of cloud architecture patterns, data lineage, and experience with governance in regulated industries.
• Experience in technical cooperation and alignment with third party technology vendors and Banking partners.
• Strong cross-functional communication skills, able to translate between technical engineering and business value.
• Background in mentoring, technical leadership, and driving architecture vision across multiple functional and technical Domains.
• Bonus: experience with FinTech, payment processing, or regulatory reporting an advantage.

Why Join Us:

• Be part of mission-critical projects (e.g., Refinancing partnerships, Anti Money laundering) that impact our financial and risk integrity.
• Take ownership of a platform used across departments, with end-to-end visibility from source to decision.
• Work with experienced engineers and stakeholders on cloud-native architecture with autonomy and purpose.
• Culture of technical ownership, business enablement, and low operational drag.

We value our diversity and welcome everyone to our team. Regardless of ethnic and social background, religious beliefs, worldview, gender, sexual orientation, physical and mental limitations, age, marital status, educational background and nationality. With over 200 employees and 40 different nationalities, we take our values seriously. These include ownership, growth, integrity, collaboration, customer centricity and inclusion.