Principal Data Engineer

Join our team as a Principal Data Engineer, where you'll be responsible for technical direction, platform design, and architectural decision-making. You'll design and build greenfield data platforms, real-time pipelines, and data products for clients who are serious about using data properly. This is a hands-on role that requires a solid grasp of cloud data services, strong Python and SQL skills, and deep experience with Spark and modern data platforms. You'll work closely with clients to understand their problems and shape solutions, while also setting engineering standards and best practices across teams.

• Lead the design and implementation of modern, cloud-native data platforms, ensuring scalability, security, and compliance.
• Build and optimize batch and real-time data pipelines, working with streaming and event-driven technologies.
• Act as a trusted technical advisor to clients, translating business needs into pragmatic engineering decisions.
• Solid grasp of cloud data services (AWS or GCP)
• Strong Python and SQL
• Deep experience with Spark and modern data platforms (Databricks / Snowflake)
• Strong data modelling skills and architectural decision-making ability
• Demonstrated ownership of large-scale data platform architectures
• Comfortable balancing trade-offs between performance, cost, and complexity
• Comfortable with multiple storage technologies and formats
• Built and operated large-scale data pipelines in production
• Strong data modelling capability and architectural judgement
• Data testing and quality frameworks (dbt, Great Expectations, Soda)
• CI/CD pipelines using tools like GitHub Actions, ArgoCD
• Infrastructure-as-code experience (Terraform, Pulumi)
• Strong consulting instincts — able to challenge assumptions and guide clients toward better outcomes
• Experience in consulting or professional services environments
• Comfortable mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical culture