Principal Data Engineer

Overview

As a Principal Data Engineer at Very, you lead and shape data architectures in the Data Enablement team, driving scalable, secure cloud-native platforms. You will guide engineering standards, mentor peers, and influence technology choices to advance the data platform across multiple initiatives. Your hands-on approach and collaboration with product, platform, and architecture teams enable faster, reliable data solutions. This role offers visible impact on Very’s data strategy and transformation.

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 data architectures for cloud-native platforms
• Lead the design and implementation of complex data engineering solutions
• Improve performance, scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency of data systems
• Set engineering standards through code reviews, reusable patterns, and best practices
• Coach and mentor engineers, fostering technical growth
• Collaborate with Product, Platform, and Architecture teams to align direction with business priorities
• Investigate production issues and drive long-term improvements
• Identify technical risks and opportunities to shape platform roadmap

Key requirements

• Experience building and supporting production data solutions
• Strong knowledge of AWS 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 engineering concepts (ingestion, CDC, data modelling, analytics)
• Experience with version control, CI/CD, and modern engineering practices
• Collaborative mindset and willingness to learn and improve the platform

• Collaborative
• Willingness to learn
• Mentoring and coaching
• AWS cloud services (S3, EKS, Lambda, SNS, EventBridge, IAM)
• Python
• SQL

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