Principal Data Engineer

Role overview

Working arrangement

• The role is hybrid, with two days per week expected in the London or Leicester office.

Core responsibilities

• Act as the primary solution architect for the cloud-first data platform.
• Align technical solutions with architecture governance, data roadmaps, and data strategy.
• Drive continuous improvement and technical debt remediation across core data platforms.
• Manage cost-effective delivery, monitor consumption, and identify technology spend optimisation opportunities.
• Lead technical solution design, estimation, risk management, and service remediation.
• Support delivery of Dunelm's data strategy and three-year business plan.

People leadership

• Provide leadership and mentoring to lead data engineers.
• Develop talent through career pathways, succession planning, retention, engagement, and performance management.
• Recruit, retain, onboard, and support compensation, benefits, and promotion processes for lead data engineers.
• Represent data engineering through industry events, professional networks, vendor forums, and technology communities.

Essential experience and skills

• Extensive experience line managing technical colleagues through coaching and mentoring.
• Extensive experience designing and developing modern data stack, cloud-first data platforms, and pipelines.
• Experience with Snowflake, Redshift, or BigQuery, AWS services, and DBT Labs.
• Programming experience in Python, Node.js, or another language, plus excellent SQL skills.
• Experience with conceptual, logical, physical, and dimensional data modelling.
• Experience with CI/CD using GitLab or GitHub and infrastructure as code using Terraform.

Desirable skills

• Power BI or ThoughtSpot visualisation experience.
• Understanding of quality practices and test automation.
• Experience managing consumption-based technology costs.
• Vendor management experience focused on operational and service performance.

Leadership behaviours