Principal Data Engineer

Overview

As Principal Data Engineer, you drive Funding Circle’s Data Platform strategy on Snowflake and AWS, shaping the future-state architecture and multi-phased migrations. You lead design and delivery of scalable data warehouse, lakehouse, and analytics capabilities, partnering with cross-functional teams to elevate data quality, governance, and product-driven data services. You’ll build a data platform that enables rapid, reliable insights for a mission-driven fintech. This role combines technical leadership with hands-on delivery and mentorship.

Pay / Benefits

• flexible benefit allowance
• private medical and dental
• life assurance
• share schemes
• annual learning allowance
• digital GP

• Own the Data Platform strategy and multi-phased migration roadmap to the Future State Data Platform on Snowflake and AWS
• Lead architecture, design and development of cloud data warehouse, lakehouse, streaming and analytics solutions
• Define ingestion, transformation, orchestration patterns and data product boundaries between Product Engineering and Data Engineering
• Identify and mitigate architectural bottlenecks, tech debt and control weaknesses across the data ecosystem
• Lead Data as a Product Community of Practice including standards for metadata, data contracts, schema design, data product versioning, DQ, SLA/SLO, and semantic layer conventions
• Champion data quality, lineage, observability and governance with code-driven checks and production monitoring
• Contribute to Data Architecture Review Board decisions ensuring engineering-viable, consistent proposals with proper recording
• Mentor and train builders across the company to create sophisticated AI-enabled data solutions
• Advise on migration architecture, transition states, historical data migration and legacy decommissioning

• 10+ years in Data & Analytics, in Staff/Principal roles within Data Engineering, Data Architecture or Data Platform
• Extensive hands-on experience building and operating cloud data platforms on Snowflake and AWS
• Proven track record leading large-scale migrations from legacy systems
• Experience designing data products across source-aligned, aggregate and consumer-aligned patterns
• Proficiency with Snowflake, Apache Iceberg, Amazon Redshift and S3
• Hands-on with dbt and Apache Airflow for data transformations and orchestration
• Infrastructure as Code with Terraform and GitHub Actions
• Data governance, metadata, lineage, data contracts, and semantic layer concepts
• Experience leveraging AI tooling to accelerate data workflows and migrations
• Cross-functional partnership with Product, Engineering, Data Science, and Governance teams
• Mentor/lead communities of practice and promote standards adoption
• Ability to architect custom AI solutions aligned with long-term mission

• Leadership
• Collaboration
• Growth mindset
• Snowflake
• AWS
• Apache Iceberg