Principal Data Engineer

Salary: £45,000 - 85,000 per year

Requirements:

• Experience building and supporting production data solutions.
• Strong knowledge of AWS cloud services, including Amazon S3, EKS, Lambda, SNS, EventBridge, and IAM.
• Strong coding skills in Python and SQL, with exposure to Java or Scala being beneficial.
• Experience with technologies such as Iceberg, Starburst, Teradata, HVR, or similar enterprise data platforms being beneficial.
• Experience working with data lakes, data warehouses, Lakehouse technologies, or enterprise data platforms.
• Solid understanding of modern data engineering concepts such as data ingestion, change data capture (CDC), data modelling, and analytics.
• Experience working with version control, CI/CD, and modern engineering practices.
• Collaborative mindset and willingness to learn from others.
• Desire to continually improve both personal skills and the platform.

Responsibilities:

• Provide technical leadership across multiple teams and initiatives.
• Design scalable, resilient, and secure data architectures.
• Build and evolve cloud-native data platforms and services.
• Lead the design and implementation of complex data engineering solutions.
• Drive improvements in performance, scalability, reliability, and cost optimisation.
• Set engineering standards through code reviews, reusable patterns, and best practices.
• Support engineers through coaching, mentoring, and technical leadership.
• Collaborate with Product, Platform, and Architecture teams to align technical direction with business priorities.
• Lead investigations into complex production issues and drive long-term improvements.
• Identify technical risks and opportunities to help shape the future roadmap of the platform.

Technologies:

• AWS
• Lambda
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• IAM
• Support
• Java
• Python
• SQL
• Scala

More:

We are the team behind digital retailer Very, and our purpose is helping families get more out of life. We offer a flexible, hybrid working model, an inclusive culture and environment, 30 days holiday plus bank holidays, a 1000 flexible benefits allowance, LinkedIn Learning access, bonus potential, up to 25% discount on Very.co.uk, and a matched pension up to 6%. This is a hands-on Principal Data Engineer role within our Data Enablement team, where we are driving data transformation and shaping the future of data engineering at Very. Our interview process typically includes a 30-minute Teams call, a take-home task, and a one-hour technical interview. We support reasonable adjustments and are proud to be a Disability Confident Committed Employer with colleague networks that help make Very an even more inclusive place to work.

last updated 36 week of 2026