Principal Data Engineer

Overview

In this role, you will be a hands-on Principal Data Engineer within the Data Enablement team, driving data transformation and setting engineering standards. You’ll lead architecture, design, and mentoring across multiple initiatives, partnering with senior peers to evolve a cloud-native data platform. You’ll influence technology choices, tackle complex production issues, and shape the roadmap for Very’s data capabilities. This is a hands-on leadership role with a clear impact on data strategy and platform performance.

Pay / Benefits

• Flexible, hybrid working model
• 1000 flexible benefits allowance
• 30 days holiday + bank holidays
• LinkedIn Learning access
• Bonus potential (performance and business-related)
• Up to 25% discount on Very.co.uk

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership across multiple teams and initiatives
• Design scalable, resilient, and secure data architectures
• Build and evolve cloud-native data platforms and services
• Lead the design and implementation of complex data engineering solutions
• Drive improvements in performance, scalability, reliability, and cost optimisation
• Set engineering standards through code reviews, reusable patterns, and best practices
• Support engineers through coaching, mentoring, and technical leadership
• Collaborate with Product, Platform, and Architecture teams to align technical direction with business priorities
• Lead investigations into complex production issues and drive long-term improvements
• Identify technical risks and opportunities, helping to shape the future roadmap of the platform

Key requirements

• Experience building and supporting production data solutions
• Strong knowledge of AWS cloud services (S3, EKS, Lambda, SNS, EventBridge, IAM)
• Strong coding skills in Python and SQL; Java or Scala beneficial
• Experience with Iceberg, Starburst, Teradata, HVR or similar enterprise data platforms beneficial
• Experience with data lakes, data warehouses, Lakehouse technologies, or enterprise data platforms
• Solid understanding of data ingestion, CDC, data modelling, and analytics
• Experience with version control, CI/CD, and modern engineering practices
• Collaborative mindset and willingness to learn and improve the platform

• Collaborative mindset
• Willingness to learn
• Strong problem-solving ability
• AWS (S3, EKS, Lambda, SNS, EventBridge, IAM)
• Python
• SQL

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