Principal Software Engineer - Data Platform

About the role

About Highnote

Founded in 2020 by a team of leaders from Braintree, PayPal, and Lending Club, Highnote is the unified platform for embedded finance, built for modern issuing, acquiring, credit, ledger, and real-time money movement. With an integrated ledger, full program management, and a purpose-built architecture, we help companies design financial products around their customers and launch faster with greater control.

We’ve raised $145M+ and have grown our team to 140+ employees across 25+ US States, with headquarters in San Francisco. Along the way, we’ve built one of the most experienced payments teams in the industry.

We’re fast-moving and hands-on, and we believe everyone deserves a seat at the table. Our values of customer obsession, executional excellence, intentional inclusion, guide how we build the payment products of tomorrow's business needs. We’re looking for people who want to help shape the future of payments.

Job Description

The Data Platform Team is part of the Data Organization and is responsible for designing and building modern scalable, secure and reliable data platforms and data pipelines. With the data platforms, we will be able to serve the product/customer data needs, improve operational efficiency and increase revenue.

What you’ll be doing

- Building secure and scalable data platforms that support our product/customer needs and power data driven decision making.

- Writing high quality and robustly tested code, mostly in Java and Python.

- Understanding business/data needs and growth to build the right solutions.

- Documenting your work to support our rapidly-scaling company.

- Interfacing with internal business stakeholders and technology partners to support day to day operations and create new data products.

What we are looking for

- 12+ years experience building high volume and low latency data platform and data pipelines using distributed event technology, e.g. Pubsub, Kafka, Kinesis, etc., and data storage system, e.g. Spanner/Postgres, BigQuery, Cassandra, data lakes, etc.

- Preferred experience with BigQuery and Snowflake.

- Able to model and design modern data structures in SQL/NoSQL databases

- A history of writing scalable, performant and maintainable code

- Experience with Java >= 11 or Python >= 3.7

- Proficiency using AI-powered development tools (e.g., Claude Code) across the full software development lifecycle - including design, prototyping, development, testing, and iteration. A demonstrated passion for AI-driven development, a commitment to continuously advancing AI skills, and a drive to push the boundaries of productivity and engineering outcomes.

Bonus skills

- Experience with cloud platforms such as GCP or AWS

- Docker and Kubernetes

- Able to model and design modern data structured in data lakes and data warehouses