Principal Engineer; Data; MLBAAY

AWS-focused Principal Data Engineer to lead the development and implementation of our University Data Hub. This role offers a unique opportunity to drive data engineering innovation in higher education.

What is our University Data Hub?

The University is undertaking a strategic project to improve its Data & Insights capability enabling the right people to get access to information and insight at the right time, with the right quality. We are currently building a brand-new University Data Hub in the AWS cloud, completely replacing an old on-premises solution which will be retired. The production UDH will transform and integrate data from as many sources as required, including live operating data, key data snapshots, and external datasets.

It will manage structured and unstructured datasets, perform analysis of incoming data quality to inform data governance work, act as a single source of the truth, and underpin all analytics activity. It will support reports and dashboards via the Data Marketplace, with advanced modelling and machine learning as internal capacity and capability allows.

What you will do

• Engineer data pipelines using AWS tech stack like Glue, Kinesis, and Step Functions
• Design domain-driven data architecture aligning with business capabilities
• Design event-driven architectures with Event Bridge and Lambda
• Manage and optimise data lake house ecosystem with S3, Athena, and Lake Formation
• Be hands-on with data modeling, distributed systems design, and performance optimization
• Implement robust data quality processes using Glue Data Quality and machine learning models
• Ensure data security through Macie, KMS, and advanced encryption frameworks

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement a modern data infrastructure
• Develop and scale governed self-service data platform serving over 3,500 staff
• Create real-time analytics solutions for university-wide operational insights
• Design and build scalable machine learning operations pipelines for predictive analytics

Professional Growth Opportunities

• Spearhead the adoption of Data Ops and MLOps methodologies
• Explore applications of emerging technologies in data processing
• Engage with the open-source community in data engineering projects
• Provide mentorship and technical leadership to a team of data engineers

Experience of skills in the following tools/domains:

• Demonstrated expertise in building scalable, cloud-native data platforms on AWS, leveraging EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, Glue (Data Quality, Studio, Data Brew), Kinesis, Step Functions, Event Bridge, SNS, Cloud Watch, and Macie for secure, event-driven data solutions
• Experienced across core data domains, including:
  • Data Engineering: ETL design, data cleansing, and batch/streaming pipelines
  • Data Platforms:
    Data lakes, warehouses, and metadata management
  • Analytics: OLAP, reporting, and visualisation (Power BI etc)
  • Databases:
    Oracle, SQL Server etc
• Strong focus on delivering scalable, governed, and insight-ready data solutions

This role is offered on a full time (36.5 hours per week) permanent basis.

There is a market supplement of up to £5,800 available at our discretion, based on skills and experience.

• a very generous employer contributory pension scheme
• generous annual leave allowance with an additional 5 discretionary days so that you can enjoy a positive work life balance
• we are a family-friendly University and with an increasingly agile workforce, are open to flexible working arrangements
• an excellent reward package that recognises the talents of our diverse workforce
• a wide range of personal and professional development opportunities
• a number of support options available for new and existing staff to help with the cost of some immigration expenses which you may be eligible for:
  Relocation allowance , Visa Reimbursement , Interest-Free Loan .

Find out more about our benefits .

We consider ourselves to be an inclusive university, where difference is celebrated, respected and encouraged. We have an excellent international reputation with staff from over 60 different nations and have made a positive commitment towards gender equality and intersectionality receiving a Silver Athena SWAN award . We truly believe that diversity of experience, perspectives, and backgrounds will lead to a better environment for our employees and students, so we encourage applications from all genders, backgrounds, and communities, particularly from under-represented groups, and value the positive impact that will have on our teams.

We are committed to maintaining a safe and secure environment for our students, staff, and community by reinforcing our Safer Recruitment commitment.

We are very proud to be an autism friendly university and are an accredited Disability Confident Leader ; committed to building disability confidence and supporting disabled staff .

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