Principal Data Engineer

At Places for People, we hire People, not numbers! Of course, experience and track record are important, but we're more interested in hiring someone that embodies our People Promises. That's someone that does the right thing, is enthusiastic and motivated to grow, believes in Community spirit, is respectful and enjoys their work. As the UK's leading Social Enterprise, we don't discriminate based on any protected attribute.

In fact, we're dedicated to creating inclusive and thriving Communities for both our Customers and Employees.

So, what are you waiting for? Join a Community that cares about you!

The Data and Platform Engineering team are the foundation for the Data Office function. Responsible for designing, building, and maintaining PfP's data platform we extract data from source, transform it into a usable format, load it into consumer models and marts and build and manage the infrastructure to do all this work.

Data Engineering are transforming the way PfP consumes data. Having transitioned from On Premise to Google Cloud we are in the process of building a leading-edge Data Mesh platform. This is an exciting time to join a growing business function, with the opportunity to make your mark in the architecture of the platform and the development of the data engineering function.

The Principal Data Engineer is a senior technical leader who drives the engineering strategy, architecture, and best practices across product domain squads. This role is pivotal in enabling decentralised data ownership while ensuring consistency, scalability, and interoperability across the data mesh.

• Technical leadership across product domains
• Architecture and design
• Mentorship and capability building
• Cross domain interoperability
• Governance and compliance enablement
• Innovation and strategic influence

With a solid understanding of Google Cloud Platform, the Principal Data Engineer is responsible for the ensuring that the design and build of all data processes on the data platform are robust, performant, and compliant. This includes, data ingestion, data quality / integrity, transformation, security and encryption, batch management, monitoring, alerting and cost control.

In addition to leading data processing the Principal Data Engineer will help design and build the Data Mesh including data modelling and the processing of data from raw through the semantic layers.

The Principal Data Engineer will identify opportunities for automation and process improvement, coach and mentor data engineers, set coding standards and best practices, implement and document data integrity and quality checks, optimise queries, and facilitate data engineering collaboration across the team.

The Principal Data Engineer will work hand in glove with the Principal Data Platform Engineer and the Data Domain Architect to ensure that the data platform and data pipeline design is optimised and reliable within Google Cloud Platform, documenting the approach and explaining the solution to engineers and non-technical business users.

You will have an extensive cloud data engineering background with deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud platforms and modern data stacks. You will have a strong understanding of domain driven design, data mesh and product thinking. You will be an excellent communicator and collaborator across technical teams.

Having worked on multiple projects within the cloud you have hands on experience in many of the tools and technologies on offer, and you embrace and learn new technologies quickly.

You have a very clear view of what good looks like and can formulate plans to deliver a target state working closely with managers and engineers to deliver that vision.

You will have multiple years' experience working in GCP with good knowledge across the platform and deep knowledge in core processing and orchestration products such as Big Query, Data Flow, Data Fusion, Data Stream, Cloud Functions, Data Proc and Airflow / Composer.

You will have excellent problem-solving skills, a rigorous approach to code checks / peer reviews and have the strength of character…