Principal Data Platform Engineer

500M+ downloads. 77M+ monthly users. A decade of building – and we’re still accelerating.

Flo is the world’s #1 health & fitness app worldwide on a mission to build a better future for female health. Backed by a $200M investment led by General Atlantic, we became the first product of our kind to reach a $1B valuation in 2024 – and we’re not slowing down.

With 6M paid subscribers and the highest-rated experience in the App Store’s health category, we’ve spent 10 years earning trust at scale. Now, we’re building the next generation of digital health – AI-powered, privacy-first, clinically backed – to help our users know their body better.

The job

We're a world-class team of product builders, engineers, data scientists, growth hackers, user researchers, designers, and medical experts — all building an app that generates long-term value for our millions of users worldwide. Our engineers aren’t just building a better product; they’re making the world a better place by improving access to important health information. We leverage machine learning and AI to provide accurate cycle predictions and relevant, personalized, and medically credible health tips.

Join our Data Platform team as a technical leader and architect shaping the future of data infrastructure for 400M+ users globally. You'll drive cross-team technical strategy, mentor senior engineers, and set the standard for engineering excellence across our data platform.

We're not a service team; we're the architects of a product suite dedicated to empowering every corner of our organization with actionable insights. Our expertise in Data Engineering and Data Quality isn't just a badge of honor; it's the cornerstone upon which our company's analytics and data pipelines stand tall.

As a Principal Data Platform Engineer, you'll take ownership of critical data infrastructure components, mentor engineers, and drive projects that directly impact product decisions affecting women's health worldwide.

What You'll Accomplish

Technical Leadership & Strategy:

• ​​Define and drive multi-quarter technical roadmap for data platform evolution aligned with company objectives
• Make high-stakes architectural decisions balancing performance, cost, scalability, and maintainability for petabyte-scale systems
• Lead evaluation and adoption of new platform technologies
• Establish engineering standards and best practices adopted across Data Platform and adjacent teams
• Drive platform cost optimization initiatives saving significant infrastructure spend while improving performance

Cross-Functional Influence:

• Partner with engineering leadership, product teams, and analytics leadership on strategic data initiatives
• Lead technical design reviews for major initiatives across Data Platform and related teams
• Represent Data Platform in organization-wide technical forums and decision-making

Engineering Excellence

• Design and implement foundational platform capabilities
• Solve the most complex technical problems others escalate, setting examples for problem-solving approaches
• Optimize platform reliability, achieving >99.9% uptime for critical data pipelines and services

What We're Looking For

Required

• 10+ years of software/data engineering experience with deep expertise in distributed systems and data platforms
• ​​Proven technical leadership with track record of driving organization-level technical strategy and architecture
• Expert-level mastery of data engineering technologies (Spark, Databricks, cloud platforms, orchestration, streaming, governance, etc.)
• Deep production experience building and scaling Data Lakehouse platforms (Databricks Unity Catalog strongly preferred)
• Strong architectural skills designing systems for scalability, reliability, and performance at petabyte scale
• Advanced understanding of data governance, security, and compliance in regulated environments
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing engineering practices across teams
• Exceptional communication skills - ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders at all levels
• Track record of making sound technical decisions with organization-wide impact
• Experience managing platform costs and optimizing infrastructure spend

Strongly Preferred

• Deep Databricks expertise including Unity Catalog architecture and Delta Lake internals
• Built real-time data platforms at scale
• Experience with semantic layer implementations and BI modernization
• Infrastructure-as-Code mastery (Terraform) managing complex cloud environments
• Led data platform migrations or major architectural transformations
• Healthcare, fintech, or regulated industry experience handling sensitive data

 

Nice to have:

• Experience building AI/ML infrastructure and LLM pipelines
• Experience with data mesh or data fabric architectures
• Contributions to Databricks community or ecosystem tools
• Background in distributed systems research or advanced CS topics

 

Why This Role is Unique

• Technical influence: Shape data strategy for a company impacting hundreds of millions of users
• Mission-driven impact: Your work directly supports women's health globally, powering insights that help millions make informed decisions
• Complex problem space: Solve unique challenges at the intersection of healthcare data, privacy, ML, and scale
• Architecture ownership: Drive decisions on platform direction with significant autonomy
• Innovation leadership: Introduce cutting-edge data technologies in production at scale

Team & Culture

You'll join a 6+ person Data Platform team reporting to the Data Platform Engineering Manager. We work closely with:

• Analytics teams supporting product and business decisions
• Backend engineers integrating data pipelines with production systems
• ML Engineering team building predictive health models
• Analytics Engineering, team defining data modeling and BI architecture
• Data Scientists developing new features and experiments
• Engineering Leadership - contributing to organization-wide technical strategy

We value:

• Engineering excellence: High code quality, thorough testing, thoughtful architecture
• Strategic thinking: Balancing immediate needs with long-term platform vision
• Collaborative leadership: Influencing through expertise, not authority
• Ownership: Taking responsibility for outcomes, not just outputs
• Pragmatism: Making smart tradeoffs between perfect and practical
• Work-life balance: Sustainable pace with flexible working arrangements

How we work

We’re a mission-led, product-driven team. We move fast, stay focused and take ownership – from brief to build to impact. Debate is encouraged. Decisions are shared. We care about craft, ship with purpose, and always raise the bar.

You’ll be working with people who take their work seriously, not themselves. It takes commitment, resilience, and the drive to keep going when things get tough. Because better health outcomes are worth it. 

What you'll get

We support impact with meaningful reward. Here’s what that looks like:

• Competitive salary and annual reviews
• Opportunity to participate in Flo’s performance incentive scheme
• Paid holiday, sick leave, and female health leave
• Enhanced parental leave and pay for maternity, paternity, same-sex and adoptive parents
• Accelerated professional growth through world-changing work and learning support
• Flexible office + home working, up to 2 months a year working abroad
• 5-week fully paid sabbatical at 5-year Floversary
• Flo Premium for friends & family, plus more health, pension and wellbeing perks

Diversity, equity and inclusion

Our strength is in our differences. At Flo, hiring is based on merit, skill and what you bring to the role – nothing else. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and we welcome applicants from all backgrounds, communities and identities. Read our privacy notice for job applicants.