Principal Data Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United Kingdom.

📋 Description

• Take ownership of the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for ENSEK's data ecosystem.

• Assist in ENSEK's domain-driven architecture and the continuous decomposition of the platform.

• Spearhead the adoption of a practical data mesh approach.

• Empower teams to consistently produce, govern, and utilize data products across the organization.

• Influence architectural decisions through technical leadership and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).

• Set standards for event-driven data architectures, schema governance, data lifecycle management, and data product ownership.

• Shape ENSEK's self-service data platform by establishing golden paths for engineering teams.

• Define and execute standards for CI/CD, data quality, observability, lineage, metadata management, and cost attribution.

• Create secure and scalable methods for sharing data with customers and partners using APIs, event streams, open table formats, and AI-driven access patterns.

• Collaborate with engineering, product, and governance stakeholders to integrate data ownership, security, classification, and compliance into platform design.

• Provide hands-on technical leadership for complex engineering challenges.

• Mentor and develop Staff and Senior Engineers.

• Foster the growth of a robust data engineering community of practice across ENSEK.

⛳️ Requirements

• Extensive experience in Data Engineering with a proven history of leading architecture and technical strategy across multiple teams or domains.

• Experience at the Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, or a comparable technical leadership level.

• In-depth expertise in designing and managing modern data platforms and lakehouse architectures on a major cloud provider, preferably AWS.

• Strong foundation in software engineering, including programming, distributed systems, and SQL.

• Practical experience with event-driven architectures, event streaming platforms, and schema governance technologies such as Kafka, Kinesis, Schema Registry, and Avro.

• Experience in implementing data mesh, data product, or domain-oriented data ownership frameworks.

• Strong knowledge of data contracts, metadata management, cataloguing, data lineage, and data quality frameworks.

• Experience in building and governing data platforms that balance self-service capabilities with effective controls and standards.

• Solid understanding of data security, privacy, classification, and access management principles.

• Experience in sharing data externally using open and portable technologies such as Apache Iceberg or similar open table formats.

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence senior technical and business leaders.

• Nice to have: Experience in supporting Machine Learning and AI platforms.

• Nice to have: Experience with MLOps and AI-driven product development.

• Nice to have: Knowledge of the energy industry or other highly regulated sectors.

• Nice to have: Experience in building platforms that support agentic AI, MCP servers, or emerging AI consumption patterns.

🏝️ Benefits

• 25 days’ holiday plus bank holidays.

• Option to buy or sell 5 additional annual leave days each year.

• Vitality Health Insurance, covering private healthcare, virtual GP access, mental health support, and wellbeing perks.

• 50% discount on gym memberships (Virgin Active, Nuffield, PureGym).

• Pension plan with a 5% matched contribution.

• Regular team and company-wide events.

• 2 volunteering days per year to contribute to the community.

• Remote-first working environment with offices located in London and Nottingham.