Principal Data Engineer

Salary: £82,000 - 95,000 per year

Requirements:

• 10+ years of experience in Data Engineering.
• Experience in a Lead or Principal Data Engineering role.
• Strong cloud data platform expertise, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Hands-on experience with BigQuery, Dataflow, Datastream, Data Fusion, Cloud Functions, Dataproc, and Airflow/Composer.
• Advanced SQL and Python skills.
• Expertise in data lakes, data warehouses, and modern data architectures.
• Strong understanding of data governance, lineage, MDM, data privacy, and PII handling.
• Experience optimising complex queries and large-scale data processing.
• Proven mentoring, coaching, and leadership capability.
• Experience working within Agile/Scrum environments and across the full software development lifecycle.
• Full right to work in the UK is required; sponsorship is not available.

Responsibilities:

• Provide technical leadership across data engineering teams and product domains.
• Define and implement data platform architecture, standards, and best practices.
• Design and optimise data ingestion, transformation, quality, security, monitoring, and governance processes.
• Lead the development of Data Mesh principles, data models, and semantic data layers.
• Drive automation, CI/CD adoption, and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Mentor and coach data engineers, promoting engineering excellence.
• Ensure cross-domain interoperability, scalability, and compliance.
• Collaborate with architects, platform engineers, and business stakeholders to deliver robust data solutions.

Technologies:

• Airflow
• BigQuery
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• Composer
• GCP
• Python
• SQL
• Security

More:

We are seeking a senior technical leader to help shape our data engineering strategy, architecture, and best practices across multiple product domains. You will work within a modern cloud environment and Data Mesh architecture to build scalable, secure, high-performing data solutions, while mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction. This is an excellent opportunity to play a key role in the evolution of our modern cloud data platform and help shape the future of our data-driven organisation.

last updated 31 week of 2026