Principal Data Engineer

The role

You will be the primary technical authority for the Data Engineering and Data Platform architecture. You will design solutions on Snowflake and AWS and lead the migration to a Future State Data Platform.

What you will do

• Own the Data Platform strategy and execute the multi-phased roadmap for migrating to the Future State Data Platform on Snowflake and AWS.
• Lead the architecture, design and development of scalable cloud data warehouse, lakehouse, streaming and analytics solutions.
• Define ingestion, transformation and orchestration patterns, naming and structural conventions.
• Identify, mitigate and resolve architectural bottlenecks, control weaknesses and technical debt.
• Own the Data as a Product Community of Practice and the standards that bind every Data Product.
• Champion data quality, lineage, observability and governance.
• Work on the Data Architecture Review Board and carry formal decision rights over data architecture decisions.
• Act as a technical bridge and mentor, training builders across the company.

Required qualifications

• A minimum of 10 years of experience in Data & Analytics.
• Experience in Staff, Principal (or equivalent) roles in Data Engineering, Data Architecture, or Data Platform.
• Extensive hands-on experience designing, building and operating cloud data platforms on Snowflake and AWS.
• Proven track record leading complex, large-scale migrations from legacy systems.
• Experience designing data products across source-aligned, aggregate and consumer-aligned patterns.
• Proven ability to architect and scale modern cloud data platforms using Snowflake, Apache Iceberg, Amazon Redshift, and S3.
• Hands-on expertise in developing robust data transformation pipelines and orchestrating complex workflows using dbt and Apache Airflow.
• Strong track record of automating infrastructure and deployment pipelines using Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform and GitHub Actions.
• Ability to implement data governance, technical catalogues, end-to-end lineage, and data product portals.
• Experience leveraging AI tooling to accelerate data engineering workflows, migrations, and platform readiness for AI applications.
• Experience establishing or leading a community of practice, driving standards adoption across teams.
• Proven track record of cross-functional partnership with Product, Engineering, Data Science, and Governance teams.

Nice to have

• experience ideally within digital products or FinTech

Benefits

• Benefit allowance to tailor to your own life and family
• Private medical and dental
• Health assessments
• Access to a digital GP
• Life assurance
• Share schemes
• Financial coaching
• Dedicated annual learning allowance
• Electric car and cycle-to-work schemes
• Season ticket loans
• Award-winning parental leave policies
• Barista coffee and subsidised Just Eat lunches

About the company

Funding Circle is a fintech company that uses data to provide funding to UK small businesses. It has the energy of a start-up with the stability of a public company.