Principal Data Engineer

At 1st Central, everything starts with our people.

As one of the UK’s leading motor and home insurers, we use smart technology, data and great service to make insurance fast, fair and simple for over 1.4 million customers. We’re proud to create an environment where people feel supported, trusted and able to grow – whether that’s developing new skills, taking on fresh challenges or making a real impact every day.

If you’re looking for a role where you can make a difference, we’d love to hear from you.

We’re currently recruiting for a Principal Data Engineer to join 1st Central, acting as a key bridge between business opportunities and technical solutions. This is a hands‑on technical role, where you’ll provide leadership on data solutions across both project delivery and ongoing data products.

You’ll take responsibility for defining the technical direction of the data platform and solution design, working closely with architects to ensure alignment with overall platform patterns and standards and will also provide clarity and technical direction to engineers building solutions against agreed designs.

While this role does not include direct line management responsibilities, you’ll play an important role in supporting, coaching and mentoring data engineers, ensuring delivery meets the required standards of quality and integrity.

• Data Engineering: As a Principal Data Engineer, you’ll bring expertise across all stages of the SDLC, alongside strong coaching, leadership and mentoring skills.
• Cloud Platforms: You’ll have deep experience with Microsoft Azure data platforms, ensuring best practices are followed to build and maintain a well‑managed, high‑performing platform.
• Technical
  
  Skills:
  
  Strong experience using Microsoft Azure, Apache Spark and Databricks for scalable, high‑performance data processing.
• Agile Working: You’ll understand how to develop solutions iteratively within agile teams, always focusing on delivering business value.
• Business Intelligence: With BI as the primary consumer of our data solutions, you’ll have a strong grasp of reporting, dashboards, and advanced modelling.
• Problem Solving & Thinking: A creative problem solver who thrives on creating simplicity out of complexity with ability to bring together multiple different views and perspectives to create agreed designs and solutions.

This is a flexible hybrid working role with occasional visits to our offices, when required, in either Salford Quays, Manchester, Haywards Heath, West Sussex, or Guernsey. We offer great flexibility in working patterns and a company‑wide culture to be proud of.

• You’ll be responsible for creating or guiding the low‑level design of data solutions, taking high‑level solution architecture artefacts and translating them into workable designs and work packages.
• You’ll be responsible for the quality of the overall data platform(s), ensuring that data pipelines and database solutions are implemented effectively from a re‑use and performance optimisation perspective.
• You’ll be responsible for coding standards, low‑level design and ingestion patterns for the data platform(s), that all users, including data engineers, follow.
• You’ll develop high‑complexity, secure, governed, high‑quality, efficient data pipelines from a variety of on and off‑premise, internal and external data sources.
• You’ll set the standards and ensure that data is cleansed, mapped, transformed and optimised for storage to meet requirements for business and technical use cases.
• You’ll design and build data observability and data quality by design into all data pipelines, promoting self‑testing pipelines that proactively identify processing issues or discrepancies.
• You’ll build solutions that pipe transform data into data lake storage areas, physical database models and reporting structures across data lake, data warehouse, business intelligence system and analytics applications.
• You’ll build physical data models that are appropriately designed to meet business needs and optimise storage requirements, ensuring maximum re‑use.
• You’ll carry out unit testing of own code, peer testing of others code to ensure…