Principal Data Engineer – Finance & Transformation

Salary: £64,000 - 104,000 per year

Requirements:

• Excellent SQL development experience.
• Extensive experience with cloud-native data ingestion, processing, and storage techniques.
• Experience with cloud data management tools such as Snowflake, AWS, and dbt, or similar PaaS and SaaS offerings.
• Experience with enterprise data management and security at scale.
• Knowledge of data modelling and optimisation.
• Expertise in data processing, testing, and monitoring practices and frameworks.
• Experience supporting production data systems and resolving operational issues within CI/CD processes and agile development workflows.
• Expertise in information security principles and access control within data environments.
• A degree or equivalent training in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline is desirable.
• Delivers work reliably and to a high standard, and builds trust through consistency, transparency, and accountability.
• Seeks to understand the problem behind a request and explores ways to improve requirements and processes through better data use.
• Encourages collaborative problem-solving, shares knowledge, and enables informed decisions.
• Raises concerns constructively and challenges ambiguity or assumptions to ensure clarity and value.
• Works openly across disciplines, connects stakeholders and delivery teams, and builds shared understanding through strong communication and engagement.

Responsibilities:

• Lead hands-on data engineering work, including the development, operation, and continuous improvement of data ingestion, storage, and processing across our organisation.
• Lead the data lifecycle from development through deployment, monitoring, incident response, performance optimisation, and deprecation in line with modern DevOps principles.
• Lead agile teams in building reusable and automated components and embedding operational best practices to keep our platform secure, resilient, observable, and cost-efficient.
• Lead others in building, testing, and deploying data pipelines for secure and scalable data delivery.
• Maintain and operate data products, ensuring availability, performance, and resilience through monitoring, alerting, patching, and incident resolution.
• Assure code and automation scripts used to manage data flows.
• Lead service reviews, health checks, and root cause analyses to improve reliability and reduce operational overhead.
• Set standards for data processing documentation and ensure changes are tracked and version-controlled.
• Support senior engineers in delivering engineering patterns, coding standards, and automated testing practices.
• Lead agile ceremonies, delivery planning, and retrospectives to support continuous improvement.
• Work with data product teams to define and measure the developer experience, streamline integration, and resolve data processing issues.
• Line manage Senior Data Engineers.
• Provide on-call support for data products on a rota basis.

Technologies:

• AWS
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• DevOps
• Support
• PaaS
• SQL
• Security
• Snowflake
• dbt

More:

We are British Airways, the nations flag carrier, connecting Britain with the world and the world with Britain for over 100 years. This Principal Data Engineer role is part of our Finance & Transformation data delivery teams. We value the contribution of everyone who works with us and offer a competitive salary, unlimited basic and premium standby travel on British Airways flights, and up to 30 discounted Hotline airfares each year for employees, friends, and family. We support development and career progression across our business. We are committed to inclusion and diversity, and to creating a workplace where everyone can be themselves and bring their originality, creativity, and identity to work.

last updated 40 week of 2026