Lead Data Engineer

Principal Data Engineer

Salary: £100,000 + 15% Bonus

Location: Central London, 2 days in office

We're hiring on behalf of our client, a global leader in personalized photo products, for an experienced Principal Data Engineer to join their UK data & ML team. This is a senior hands-on leadership role driving data platform strategy and engineering standards as they evolve toward de-centralised data and ML adoption.

Role overview:

You'll play a central role in re-architecting and scaling their data platform to meet growing business and customer needs. This includes building robust, observable data pipelines, ensuring data trustworthiness, and mentoring a team of engineers while collaborating closely with Product, Ops, and Marketing stakeholders.

Key responsibilities:

• Lead design and build of scalable, cloud-native data solutions with best-in-class governance and observability
• Define technical principles and data engineering standards across distributed teams
• Coach data and analytics engineers on SDLC best practices (CI/CD, testing, versioning)
• Contribute to strategic planning and technical roadmaps in collaboration with product and engineering leads
• Influence cross-functional stakeholders on architecture and implementation trade-offs
• Ensure data is reliable, timely, and actionable for operational and ML-driven use cases

About you:

• Strong background in software and data engineering leadership
• Proficient in Python, SQL, and modern ELT practices (e.g. dbt, Fivetran, Airflow)
• Deep knowledge of data warehousing (Snowflake), AWS services (e.g. Lambda, Kinesis, S3), and IaC (Terraform)
• Experienced in building data platforms with a focus on governance, reliability, and business value
• Comfortable driving architectural conversations and mentoring engineers across disciplines
• Advocate for decentralised data models, such as data mesh

Nice to have:

• Experience with data quality tools (e.g., Monte Carlo)
• Knowledge of data security and compliance
• Previous work in e-commerce or consumer tech

This is a chance to shape the next generation of data systems powering personalised customer experiences at scale - while working in a people-first, purpose-driven culture.