Principal Data Engineer

Create Future is a digital consultancy focused on building digital products and services for major organisations.

We are looking for a Principal Data Engineer to join our Data Practice and own the technical direction of our iGaming data engineering capability. You'll work with the world’s largest betting and gaming operators, processing hundreds of millions of events per day across sports book, casino, exchange, and lottery platforms.

A Principal at Create Future defines the hardest data engineering problems in iGaming: petabyte-scale migrations, sub‑millisecond event pipelines, settlement reconciliation at bookmaker scale, and the data foundations that keep operators compliant with gambling regulators globally.

You will influence the shape of engagements from pre‑sales through to delivery, grow engineering talent, and be a recognizable voice for Create Future in the iGaming market.

• Defining and owning the data engineering architecture patterns Create Future uses across iGaming engagements — migration frameworks, streaming architectures, data integrity standards, and Lakehouse design
• Acting as the most senior technical authority on client engagements — making critical architecture decisions, resolving design disputes, and setting the bar for quality
• Reviewing and signing off technical designs produced by Lead and Senior engineers across active engagements
• Identifying and driving adoption of new tooling, patterns, and AWS services that improve delivery outcomes across the iGaming practice

• Leading the technical design and execution of large‑scale data migrations — moving high‑volume transactional and event data from on‑premises or legacy cloud estates to AWS, without loss of fidelity or operational continuity
• Architecting real‑time and near‑real‑time data pipelines for sports book and in‑play use cases — odds feeds, market events, bet placement streams, and settlement pipelines — where latency and correctness are non‑negotiable
• Designing and enforcing data integrity frameworks across betting, trading, and customer data domains — including reconciliation between source and target systems, anomaly detection, and audit trail requirements
• Overseeing the implementation of regulatory and compliance reporting pipelines that meet the requirements of the UK Gambling Commission and international licensing bodies
• Working with AWS services including S3, Glue, Lambda, Athena, Redshift, RDS, Kinesis, MSK, Lake Formation, Step Functions, and MWAA — selecting the right tool for each problem rather than defaulting to a stack

• Mentoring and growing Lead and Senior Data Engineers — through code review, pairing, architecture sessions, and career conversations
• Building the iGaming data engineering playbook: reusable patterns, accelerators, and reference architectures that reduce time‑to‑value on new engagements
• Contributing to hiring — defining what great looks like for data engineering roles and playing an active part in assessment
• Representing Create Future externally — at industry events, in technical blog posts, and in client‑facing settings — as a credible voice on iGaming data engineering

• Shaping and leading technical responses to iGaming opportunities — scoping complex engagements, writing architecture proposals, and presenting to senior client stakeholders
• Identifying expansion opportunities within existing client relationships — spotting data engineering problems we can help solve and framing them as propositions
• Partnering with AWS on joint go‑to‑market activity where relevant, leveraging Create Future's Advanced Partner status

• Extensive experience working in or closely with sports book, exchange, or casino platforms — understanding the data models, operational pressures, and regulatory constraints from the inside
• Led or made decisive contributions to large‑scale data migrations in iGaming — moving live betting, customer, or trading data at scale while maintaining integrity and uptime
• Designed or owned low‑latency data pipelines where correctness and throughput are both critical — odds ingestion, in‑play…