Principal Data Engineer

What we’ll offer you:

Our hiring process

Inclusion at CreateFuture

Qualifications

• Consulting background
• You've spent a significant part of your career in a consultancy, professional services, or client-facing delivery environment — you know how to build trust quickly, work across ambiguous or fast-changing requirements, and deliver under commercial pressure
• You're comfortable moving between clients and industries, ramping up on new domains quickly rather than relying on years of embedded context
• You've shaped and sold technical work — writing proposals, scoping engagements, and presenting architecture decisions to client stakeholders
• You understand the difference between "good engineering" and "good engineering for this client, this budget, this timeline" — and can navigate that trade-off transparently
• Cloud data engineering mastery
• You have deep experience with streaming architectures — Kinesis, Kafka/MSK, Flink, or Spark Streaming — and know when each is the right choice
• You can model the cost implications of architecture decisions and advise clients on trade-offs between throughput, latency, durability, and spend
• Engineering excellence
• Mastery of Python, SQL, and Spark — and strong opinions on how they should be used in production data pipelines
• Deep experience with dbt, Airflow, or equivalent orchestration — including how to build pipelines that are testable, observable, and operationally sound
• Strong understanding of data quality engineering — not just validation rules, but how to build systems that detect and surface integrity issues before they reach consumers
• Comfortable with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, AWS CDK) and treating data platform infrastructure as a first-class engineering concern
• Leadership
• You've operated at Principal or equivalent level — making architectural decisions that affect multiple teams, and being accountable for their outcomes
• You're comfortable in C-suite and VP-level client conversations, translating technical complexity into business risk and opportunity
• You can hold a room on a difficult technical topic and reach a decision — not just present options
• You've grown engineering talent around you and take it seriously as a leadership responsibility
• We trust people to do their best work. That means flexibility over rigid rules, impact over activity, and real investment in your growth both professionally and personally. You’ll be part of a supportive, and friendly culture, surrounded by smart, curious people who care deeply about what they do.
• We offer flexible working, including hybrid and remote options. Our office hubs are located in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London and Bulgaria, with occasional travel to client sites or CreateFuture offices when needed.
• We trust you to manage your time balancing collaboration with client time and focused work. What matters is the impact you have, not how busy you look.
• Our hiring process
• We try to keep our hiring process clear, fair and respectful of your time. We aim to get back to everyone who applies and we will be upfront about where you are in the process.
• Call with our Talent Acquisition Team
• Role specific capability interview
• Depending on the role, we might also ask you to do a short presentation, a practical or technical task or have a values focused conversation. We will explain what is involved before anything happens.
• Inclusion at CreateFuture
• We believe diverse teams build better workplaces and better products. We want CreateFuture to be a place where people feel able to be themselves and do their best work.
• If you need any adjustments or support during the application process, just. We will do what we can to help.
• We look forward to your application!

Preferred Qualifications

• You can design across the full data engineering stack — from ingestion and streaming through to warehousing, serving, and cost optimisation — on a major cloud platform (AWS strongly preferred)
• Cloud certification at professional or specialty level is strongly preferred