Principal Data Engineer

Overview

In this Principal Data Engineer role, you own and shape our data platforms on Google Cloud, ensuring reliable, well-modeled data foundations for analytics. You lead a small data team and work closely with Engineering and Data Science to translate business needs into practical plans. You drive platform ingestion, modeling, and governance while enabling cross-functional teams to leverage data effectively. This is a hands-on leadership role focused on scalable, secure data solutions that empower analytics at scale.

Pay / Benefits

• competitive salary
• competitive annual leave allowance
• private medical insurance
• flexible working arrangements

Responsibilities

• Own and operate data platforms, including ingestion, orchestration, BigQuery warehouse, dbt tooling, and Python data services on GCP; manage CI/CD, IaC, access, and cost control
• Ensure data freshness, reliability, alerting, incident response, and safe backfills/reruns
• Design layered data models for analytics, from staging to dimensional marts
• Collaborate with Engineering and AI/Data Science to meet data needs and address data issues at source
• Plan work by turning requests into a prioritized backlog and roadmap
• Set engineering standards: review SQL/Python/dbt code, enforce tests/contracts, and ensure reversible production changes
• Lead and develop the data team through mentoring, regular 1:1s, code reviews, and career development

Key requirements

• Strong SQL and Python for production data pipelines
• Hands-on experience with a cloud data warehouse, dbt or equivalent, and workflow orchestration (incremental loading, safe reruns, performance tuning)
• Data modelling for analytics (dimensional design, semantic layers, well-documented datasets)
• Experience owning a production data platform on a major cloud with IaC, permissions, monitoring, incident recovery, and cost management
• Security and data privacy practices including GDPR and least-privilege access
• Ability to translate stakeholder needs into a prioritized backlog and reconcile data for reporting
• Line management or mentoring of engineers and technical leadership via code reviews and documentation
• Experience with modern cloud data platforms, orchestration tooling, IaC, and analytics platforms

• Stakeholder management
• Prioritisation and backlog management
• Collaborative cross-functional working
• SQL
• Python
• Google Cloud Platform (GCP)