Principal Engineer, BCG Expand, London

Overview

As Principal Engineer, you will design and implement scalable data infrastructure powering advanced analytics and data science. You’ll shape the strategy and execution of data products, collaborating with senior stakeholders across cross-functional teams. You’ll lead end-to-end data ingestion, governance, and security in hybrid cloud environments, driving impactful product roadmaps and ensuring reliable, scalable solutions. This role blends hands-on engineering with strategic product thinking in a dynamic, inclusive culture.

Responsibilities

• Architect end-to-end data ingestion pipelines
• Design and build ETL/ELT processes and data architectures
• Lead database design, data modeling, and integration for analytics at scale
• Design secure, scalable data ingestion across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data
• Partner with product owners to develop data exchange protocols and governance practices
• Create and manage hybrid cloud data environments and pipelines for big data platforms
• Contribute to data product strategy and roadmaps from launch to scale
• Oversee cross-functional product initiatives and foster agile, high-performing teams
• Provide data-driven updates on product performance and milestones
• Collaborate with data scientists to curate and prepare model-ready datasets
• Map data fields to hypotheses, wrangle data, and ensure dataset quality
• Promote a culture of quality, automation, and continuous improvement
• Ensure secure and compliant handling of sensitive client data
• Deliver scalable, maintainable solutions with strong security posture

Key requirements

• Hands-on experience in data engineering, software development, or analytics with measurable impact
• Proven success in launching and scaling technical products or platforms
• Strong programming skills in at least two: Python, SQL, Java
• Commercial experience in client-facing projects is a plus
• Deep knowledge of distributed systems (e.g., Spark, Hadoop, EMR)
• Proficient with RDBMS (SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Cassandra, DynamoDB, Neo4j)
• Solid software engineering practices: reviews, testing, CI/CD, maintainability
• Experience deploying applications to production, including packaging, monitoring, releases
• Ability to extract insights from complex data and communicate with stakeholders
• Hands-on cloud experience (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Familiarity with ETL tools (Informatica, Talend, Pentaho, DataStage) and data warehousing
• Strong data security, compliance, and governance knowledge
• Experience leading or influencing cross-functional teams in a product/platform context
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills

• Cross-functional collaboration
• Strategic thinking
• Proactive risk identification and mitigation
• Python
• SQL
• Java

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