Principal Data Engineer

We’re First Central Insurance & Technology Group (First Central for short), an innovative, market-leading insurance company. We protect the things customers love so they can get on with what matters to them in life.

Data drives us. It fuels our outstanding distribution, finance, technology and legal services. Our underwriting skills are built on data expertise; it creates the insights we need to give the right cover to the right customers at the right price. But, it’s the people inside and outside our business that power us. They make us stand out, help us succeed. We’re ambitious. We’re growing. We’ve won awards.

At First Central, we have ambitious growth plans and a commitment to delivering outstanding services to our customers. To support our business and data strategy, we’re investing in our central data teams. We’re now recruiting aPrincipal Data Engineerto join our Data Engineering Leadership team. This role represents the pinnacle of data engineering expertise at First Central, acting as a key bridge between business opportunities and technical solutions.

Working across multiple data product teams, you’ll support capability leads, product owners, and data engineers to design, build, and run high-performing data solutions within our Azure data platform. If you're passionate about data, cloud technology, and enabling business success through high-quality engineering, we’d love to hear from you.

This is aflexible hybrid workingrole with occasional visits to our offices, when required, in eitherSalford Quays, Manchester, Haywards Heath, West Sussex,orGuernsey. If you live further afield, we’ll accept applications for remote workers! We offer great flexibility in working patterns and a company-wide culture to be proud of.

Core skills we’re looking for to succeed in the role:

• Data Engineering:As a Principal Data Engineer, you’ll showcase expertise across all stages of the SDLC while coaching, mentoring, and supporting our teams of data engineers.
• Cloud Platforms:You’ll have deep experience with Azure data platforms, ensuring best practices are followed to create and maintain a well-managed, high-performing platform.
• Agile Working:You’ll understand how to develop solutions iteratively within agile teams, always focusing on delivering business value.
• Business Intelligence:With BI as the primary consumer of our data solutions, you’ll have a strong grasp of reporting, dashboards, and advanced modelling.
• AI/ML:As we continue investing in AI and machine learning, experience in this area will be highly beneficial as we explore and develop new use cases.

What’s involved:

• You’ll be responsible for creating or guiding the low-level design of data solutions, taking high-level solution architecture artefacts and translating them into workable designs and work packages.
• You’ll ensure that data pipelines and database solutions are implemented effectively from a re-use and performance optimisation perspective.
• You’ll be responsible for coding standards, low-level design, and ingestion patterns for the data platform(s), which all users, including data engineers, follow.
• You’ll develop high complexity, secure, governed, high quality, efficient data pipelines from a variety of on and off premise, internal and external data sources.
• You’ll set the standards and ensure that data is cleansed, mapped, transformed, and optimised for storage to meet requirements for business and technical use cases.
• You’ll design and build data observability and data quality by design into all data pipelines, promoting self-testing pipelines that proactively identify processing issues or discrepancies.
• You’ll build solutions that pipe transform data into data lake storage areas, physical database models, and reporting structures across data lake, data warehouse, business intelligence systems, and analytics applications.
• You’ll build physical data models that are appropriately designed to meet business needs and optimise storage requirements, ensuring maximum re-use.
• You’ll carry out unit testing of your own code, peer testing of others' code to ensure appropriate quality, and be responsible for completeness and integrity of solutions delivered on the data platform(s).
• You’ll ensure that effective and appropriate documentation that brings transparency and understandability are in place for all content on the data platform(s).
• You’ll coach and mentor Senior Data Engineers, Data Engineers & Associate Data Engineers.
• You’ll create high complexity BI solutions including data mart, semantic layer, and reporting & visualisation solutions in recognised BI tools such as PowerBI.

Experience & knowledge:

• Requires extensive experience of designing and building end-to-end data solutions (10 years +).
• Exceptional at building strong, effective relationships with people from different disciplines.
• Experience of carrying out data engineering design and build activities using agile working practices (such as Scrum or Kanban).
• Experience of Databricks solutions, Databricks administration, and pyspark.
• Data Factory/Synapse Workspace – for building data pipelines or synapse analytics pipelines.
• Data Lake – Delta Lake design pattern implementation experience in Azure Data Lake Gen2 with file hierarchy namespace and low-level permissions management.
• Synapse Warehouse/Analytics – Experience in Synapse data mappings, external tables, schema creation from SSMS, knowledge on how Synapse pool works behind the scenes.
• Azure Active Directory – for Managed identities creation and usage or for generating service principles for authentication and authorization.
• Version Control – Experience in building Data Ops i.e., CICD pipelines in Azure DevOps with managed identity.
• Unit Testing – Experience in writing unit tests for data pipelines.
• Data Architecture – Knowledge or experience in implementing Kimball style Data Warehouse. Experience in building Metadata with Azure Purview or Data Lake Gen2.
• Data Quality – Experience in applying Data Quality rules within Azure Data Flow Activities.
• Data Transformation – Extensive hands-on with Azure Data Flow Activities for Cleansing, transforming, validation, and quality checks.
• Azure Cloud – Knowledge and confidence in effective communication on Azure Cloud Subscriptions, Resource Groups, Subnet, VNet, Private Endpoints testing, Firewall rules management on Azure data platform components.
• Keen and active interest in the use of data in the wider industry, with practical knowledge and networks.

Skills & Qualifications:

• A creative problem solver who thrives on creating simplicity out of complexity.
• A passion for people and creating environments that enable others to flourish.
• Resilient and comfortable prioritising in demanding situations.
• Highly trustworthy and able to operate with integrity and discretion at all times.
• Energetic and proactive, and someone who motivates others by their “can do, will do” attitude.
• Able to operate with minimal brief, and a fast-moving set of changing priorities.
• Ability to bring together multiple different views and perspectives to create agreed designs and solutions.

This is just the start. Imagine where you could end up! The journey’s yours…

What can we do for you?

People first. Always. We’re passionate about our colleagues and know the best people deserve an extraordinary working environment. We owe it to them so that’s what we offer. Our workplaces are energetic, inspirational, supportive. To get a taste of the advantages you’ll enjoy, take a look at all our perks in fullhere.

Intrigued? Our Talent team can tell you everything you need to know about what we want and what we’re offering, so feel free to get in touch.

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