Principal Engineer - Data

Join us as a Principal Engineer 

• This is a challenging role where you’ll drive data engineering across the domain, delivering scalable, high-quality data platforms and pipelines that support customer outcomes and business performance 

• With your expertise, you’ll work closely with architects to define domain-wide data platforms, data architecture and engineering roadmaps  

• You’ll gain valuable senior stakeholder exposure, alongside the opportunity to hone both your technical and leadership skills 

• We are offering this role at Director level

What you’ll do 

As a Principal Engineer, you’ll create customer value through innovative engineering solutions and technology designs that are customer-focused, high-performing, secure and resilient. 

You’ll lead large-scale and complex data engineering initiatives across the domain, coordinating multiple teams to deliver robust and scalable data solutions. You’ll help make sure technical journeys support strategic objectives and contribute to the delivery of key business outcomes. 

You’ll also be: 

• Defining, governing and standardising data engineering practices and solutions, with a focus on scalability, automation, resilience, reusability and data quality 

• Working with Platform, Feature, and Data Engineering teams to design and deliver scalable data pipelines, platforms and services 

• Developing architecture models and roadmaps for data platforms, pipelines and services to meet business and technical requirements 

• Influencing domain and enterprise data strategy, driving platform modernisation and identifying opportunities to improve scalability, efficiency, and data-driven capabilities 

• Driving engineering best practices across data modelling, pipeline design, data quality and governance standards 

• Leading the adoption of AI and intelligent tooling to improve engineering productivity, automate data workflows and enhance data quality and insight 

The skills you'll need 

To succeed in this role, you’ll bring significant experience in data engineering, data platform design and large-scale data architecture. Alongside an expert understanding of modern data technologies, you’ll have a strong track record of building scalable, reliable and high-performing data platforms and pipelines. 

You’ll also bring experience leading data engineering teams and driving engineering practices across multiple teams in a matrix environment. Deep expertise in distributed data processing is essential, alongside experience embedding strong data governance, quality and lineage practices across complex data environments. 

You’ll also need: 

• Experience with modern data platforms and technologies, including Spark, Kafka, and cloud-based data ecosystems such as AWS or GCP 

• A track record of using AI or intelligent tooling to improve engineering workflows, data preparation and pipeline efficiency 

• Significant experience of test-driven development and using automated testing frameworks, mocking, stubbing and unit testing tools 

• Experience designing or implementing APIs that support scalable data services 

• The ability to rapidly understand business and product requirements, translating them into effective technical solutions 

• Familiarity with code repositories, bug tracking tools and collaborative engineering platforms