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Principal Data Engineer

Arqiva
City of London
3 days ago
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Job Description
Location

We operate a flexible, hybrid working environment with the candidate required to travel to either our Winchester or London office once or twice a week.


We offer

  • Competitive Salary
  • 10% bonus
  • 6% pension contribution
  • Private Medical
  • 25 days annual leave
  • Access to our comprehensive flexible benefits including discounts on big brands, wellness and employee assistance programmes, gymflex, buy and sell annual leave, travel and dental insurance
  • Work. Life. Smarter. Our commitment to a flexible and hybrid working culture

Purpose

We're looking for a hands‑on Principal Data Engineer to lead the design and development of scalable, secure cloud‑based data platforms and pipelines that power enterprise analytics, reporting, and real‑time decision‑making.


This is a strategic and technical leadership role, ideal for someone with deep expertise in AWS, Databricks, Apache Spark, and Python/SQL, who can mentor teams, influence architecture, and deliver end‑to‑end data solutions across a modern tech stack.


Accountabilities

  • Design and deliver enterprise‑scale data architectures on AWS using services like S3, EMR, Glue, Redshift, Lambda, and IAM.
  • Build and manage robust ETL/ELT pipelines supporting both batch and real‑time data ingestion and transformation.
  • Deploy and optimise Apache Spark jobs, leveraging Databricks and Delta Lake for distributed data processing.
  • Lead the implementation of unified analytics workflows, integrating Databricks with the wider AWS environment.
  • Write clean, efficient, and reusable code in Python, building production‑ready data transformation scripts.
  • Develop complex SQL queries across multiple RDBMS and cloud‑native warehouses.
  • Drive data quality, lineage, and governance standards across structured and unstructured datasets.
  • Collaborate with data scientists, analysts, and business stakeholders to define and deliver scalable solutions.
  • Provide technical mentorship and thought leadership to data engineers and wider delivery teams.
  • Promote automation and operational efficiency through CI/CD, containerisation (e.g. Docker/ECS), and infrastructure as code.

Skills

  • Python, SQL, PySpark, Scala, Java
  • AWS (S3, Glue, Redshift, Lambda, EMR, IAM, ECS, SageMaker), Databricks, Delta Lake
  • Apache Spark, Airflow, Dagster, Rundeck
  • Kafka, Logstash, NiFi
  • PostgreSQL, Oracle DB, MongoDB
  • ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), Dynatrace, CloudWatch
  • GitLab, CI/CD, Docker, Infrastructure as Code
  • Agile/Scrum

Knowledge & Experience

  • Senior/principal data engineering roles with hands‑on leadership experience.
  • Proven success in designing and deploying cloud‑native data solutions, particularly on AWS.
  • Advanced experience with Apache Spark, Databricks, and real‑time data processing.
  • Strong capability in writing and optimising complex SQL and Python code.
  • Background in handling large‑scale data transformations and integrating multiple data sources.
  • Experience with data lakes, Delta Lake, and modern analytics platforms.
  • Skilled in stakeholder engagement, mentoring engineers, and delivering high‑quality solutions in fast‑paced environments.
  • A passion for simplifying complex problems and building future‑proof data infrastructure.


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