Principal Data Engineer

Job Description

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Principal Data EngineerLocation: RemoteSalary: Up to £95,000Sponsorship: Not available

VIQU have partnered with a nationally recognised organisation that has recently completed a full migration from on-premise infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and is now building a modern, domain-oriented Data Mesh. This is a critical leadership hire as they continue to scale their cloud data platform and embed engineering excellence across multiple product domains.

This is not a step-up role. They will only consider candidates with proven Principal or Lead-level experience, including clear ownership of engineers, standards, and cross-domain architectural direction.

The Role

As Principal Data Engineer, you will be the senior technical authority across data product squads, driving strategy, architecture, and engineering best practice.

Key responsibilities include:

• Providing visible, hands-on technical leadership across multiple domain teams
• Defining how projects are approached and ensuring delivery standards are upheld
• Designing and governing scalable pipelines using BigQuery, Dataflow, Datastream, Data Fusion, Dataproc and Cloud Composer (Airflow)
• Leading best practice across dbt, Terraform, Docker and CI/CD
• Driving Data Mesh adoption, domain ownership, and interoperable data products
• Setting modelling standards across raw, curated and semantic layers
• Embedding governance covering lineage, MDM, data quality, PII and compliance
• Mentoring and challenging senior engineers to maintain high standards

You will work closely with Architects and Platform Engineering to ensure performance, cost control, security and scalability across the GCP estate.

What They Need

• 10+ years in Data Engineering
• Clear, demonstrable experience leading engineers at Lead/Principal level
• Deep, hands-on GCP experience (this is essential)
• Strong SQL and Python expertise
• Experience building cloud-native data platforms end-to-end
• Strong background in Data Lake / Warehouse architecture
• Proven experience implementing CI/CD and infrastructure as code
• Confidence to challenge stakeholders and influence technical direction

Candidates without strong, proven leadership experience in enterprise-scale environments will not be considered.

Why Join?

You’ll be joining at a pivotal stage in the evolution of a 100% cloud-native platform. The foundations are in place, but the Data Mesh journey is still being shaped. This is a genuine opportunity to influence architecture, standards, and the long-term engineering strategy — fully remote, with executive backing and real scope for impact.

Apply now to speak with VIQU IT in confidence. Or contact Aaron Chiverton on the VIQU website. Know someone great? Refer them and receive up to £1,000 if successful (terms apply). xwzovoh For more exciting roles and opportunities, follow us on LinkedIn @VIQU IT Recruitment.