Principal Engineer, Data Quality Platform

As Principal Engineer for the Data Quality Platform at Talos, you own data correctness across the company. You lead the data quality engineering team, run BAU data operations, and own reference and security master data along with the pipelines and platform that deliver it. Your mandate is to work independently from product engineering and challenge its assumptions, testing them with evidence to ensure the data Talos returns to clients is always correct.

What you'll do

• Lead AI-first data quality engineering and validate every client-facing endpoint continuously, including REST and WebSocket APIs as well as cloud delivery via S3, Snowflake, and Databricks, asserting correctness against independent sources of truth across every environment and client entitlement.
• Cover streaming and request/response patterns, including sequencing and gap detection, snapshot-to-increment consistency, reconnect and replay correctness, staleness of live subscriptions, and agreement between streamed and REST views of the same state.
• Use adaptive detection rather than static thresholds, learning baselines per endpoint and market so alerts remain relevant as normal patterns change.
• Apply LLM and agentic tooling to generate checks from API specs and schemas, keep them current as the product evolves, and triage alerts before human review, while knowing when deterministic rules, invariants, or cross-source reconciliation are the better approach.
• Design and run load, performance, and failure-mode tests to assess system resilience.
• When you find a fault, raise it with the owning team with sufficient evidence to enable action, drive it to resolution, then add a check that would have caught it earlier.
• Measure and publish endpoint and field coverage, time to detect, detected-before-client rate, and false-positive rate.
• Build and maintain a catalog of data assets and APIs covering lineage and downstream consumers, maintaining an understanding of what breaks when they change.
• Own data governance tooling such as OpenMetadata.
• Lead the build-out of a next-generation security master platform, then run it day to day, handling new listings, symbol mapping across venues, and increment and contract specs.
• Design processes for safe updates to security entries with validation and rollback.
• Expand data quality coverage over time to trade signals, pre-trade analytics, client post-trade analysis, and PMS analytics.

What you bring

• A track record leading data QA or data quality teams, preferably on market data or other high-throughput, real-time data.
• Deep understanding of streaming and API behaviour including throughput, WebSocket semantics, ordering, recovery, and failure modes.
• Experience inventorying and testing a large API and data surface end to end.
• Hands-on experience with data governance, including cataloging, lineage, and ownership.
• Experience with performance and load testing of distributed systems.
• A strong engineering background where you design platforms rather than scripts, and build on shared infrastructure rather than creating one-off tooling.
• Practical experience applying LLM and agentic tooling to engineering problems.
• Experience with Flink, Doris, Dagster, Spark, and OpenMetadata, or comparable tools such as Apache Atlas.

What we offer

• Retirement plan contributions
• Unlimited vacation plus a $2000 USD PTO bonus if you take 15 days off with 5 consecutive days included
• Yearly discretionary cash bonus
• Employee stock options plan
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Paid parental leave for 20 weeks after 1 year of service
• Global offsites and team outings
• One-time stipend towards at-home office set-up
• $50 USD monthly wellness credit for gym memberships, ski passes, and fitness classes
• $25 USD lunch credit for days in-office
• Donation matching up to $100 USD annually
• In-office perks including catered lunches on Tuesdays, snacks, and drinks

About Talos

Founded in 2018, Talos provides institutional-grade trading technology for the global digital asset market, powering many of the major players in the crypto ecosystem. The company is a globally distributed team with hubs in New York, London, Singapore, and Cyprus, operating in a hybrid-friendly environment committed to advancing mass adoption of digital assets by seamlessly connecting institutions to the ecosystem.