Principal Data Engineer

We are a forward-thinking company that recently launched an innovative Petcare Platform, poised to revolutionize how we utilize real-time event data within our operational and analytical ecosystems. As we continue to grow, we are excited to enhance our data capabilities and processes, bridging Microsoft Azure with Google Cloud Platform to deliver cutting-edge solutions. To support this ambitious journey, we are looking for two experienced Principal Engineers to join our Data Platforms team within the Engineering function.

The Opportunity:

As a Principal Engineer, you will play a pivotal role in defining and driving key technical initiatives across our Engineering and Data Science/Analytics teams. These roles are for senior individual contributors who are experts in enterprise-level engineering improvements, with a focus on delivering tangible value for our customers, shareholders, and developers. We are currently transitioning from traditional batch orchestration (Airflow/Composer, Bigquery, dbt) into event streaming; this will involve developing and deploying new tools and processes on our analytics platform, where you will be expected to mentor and guide colleagues across the Platform, Data and Analytics Engineering disciplines. You will directly shape the delivery of this exciting new development in our analytics and operational capabilities, and the tools you design and deploy will change the way the business sees its data, making decisions which directly impact our customers faster than ever before.

These two roles will share common ground, but we expect one Principal Engineer to focus more heavily on foundational capabilities/technologies (delivering robust deployment of data streaming infrastructure and applications/services, promoting Software Engineering best practice, shaping our emerging MLOps capabilities) and the other to focus on data modelling/Analytics Engineering (shaping how we build, monitor and share robust data products to enable low-latency self-serve analytics in the wider internal analytics community). We are looking for a collaborative mindset and we have enough technical breadth in scope to give each Principal Engineer plenty to take charge of!

As a Principal Engineer, you will be responsible for:

• Overseeing the technical implementation of upcoming strategic projects, from design discussions through development, deployment, testing and capturing/disseminating lessons learned
• Making technical decisions around how we structure our platform, handle data streams, model/warehouse data and surface data products to Data Science/Insights/Visualisation colleagues across the business
• Spearheading new deployments/features within our Data Platforms to improve Engineering Excellence and time to first insight for our internal customers
• Providing technical mentorship/guidance to around 20 engineers across the team through individual 1:1 calls, group engagements, publication and encouragement of best practice/code standards – no line management is required in these roles, but nurturing the team’s collective knowledge/capability is very much expected

Key Responsibilities:

• Ensure solutions developed by colleagues are fit for purpose and aligned with our strategic technical direction
• Provide guidance, support, and assistance to the Data Platforms team and wider Engineering function
• Actively participate in designing and developing simple data platform solutions which meet complex business requirements
• Understand, identify and implement improvements to existing practices and processes in use across our platforms
• Define and evolve our agile development lifecycle and tooling

Essential Experience, Knowledge & Expertise

• Proven experience of leading and mentoring a technical team or significant experience as a senior team member
• Customer-oriented approach with a focus on outcomes
• Proven experience engaging both technical and non-technical stakeholders of varying seniority
• Demonstrable knowledge of designing, developing, deploying and supporting enterprise-grade production data platform tooling or data modelling approaches
• A strong understanding of Agile practices

Desirable Experience, Knowledge & Expertise

• Experience building and/or deploying Customer Data Platforms, data streaming architectures for real-time analytics, cloud data lake/warehousing or semantic modelling
• Prior experience leveraging retail customer data for personalisation
• Working knowledge of deploying and/or using MLOps tooling/frameworks (open source or cloud-native) or data visualisation tools (Tableau, Qlik, Looker, PowerBI etc.)
• Expertise in encouraging better practice through CI/CD pipelines, KEDBs, SOPs, code review (conventional commits/comments etc)

Role Specific Competencies

• Technical Leadership: You are passionate about building better tools, processes, and systems, and you thrive on collaborative team success.
• Product Mindset: You focus on understanding what is needed, not just what is asked for, to deliver the best product.
• Comfort with Ambiguity: You embrace changing requirements as opportunities for growth and innovation.
• Strategic Vision: You can see how the small pieces fit together without losing sight of the bigger picture.

Why Join Us?

This is a unique opportunity to be part of a dynamic and innovative team at the forefront of transforming pet care. You will directly shape the delivery of new capabilities within our analytics and operational platforms, with your work having a direct impact on our customers and business. If you’re passionate about leveraging data to drive business success and enjoy leading technical initiatives in a collaborative environment, we’d love to hear from you.

Pets just see people. They aren’t biased and they don’t discriminate. We take our inspiration from pets and we value and respect difference in all its forms. Our aim is to reflect the diversity of the communities we operate in and every colleague can help us achieve this. We encourage our people to be themselves so even if your skills and experience don’t perfectly align, if you think you can make a unique contribution through your values and behaviours, we want to hear from you!