Principal Data Engineer

Job Description

We don’t just believe in better. We make it happen. Better content. Better products. And better careers.

Working in Tech, Product or Data at Sky is about building the next and the new. From broadband to broadcast, streaming to mobile, Sky Stream to Sky Glass, we never stand still. We optimise and innovate. We turn big ideas into the products, content and services millions of people love. And we do it all right here at Sky.

Team overview:
Our vision is to enable Sky’s growth ambitions though Data and AI: deepening customer relationships, optimising commercial performance, and enhancing operational efficiency.

Principal Engineers operate within defined domains and provide leadership to our Solution Architects. With deep technical expertise, they act as Technical Leads, shaping future‑ready frameworks that support our strategic objectives. They set, evolve, and uphold engineering standards across the team, continually raising the bar for quality, innovation, and delivery. As a senior role, Principal Engineers play a critical part in connecting Data Engineering with wider Technology and Architecture functions.

They work collaboratively across teams to ensure alignment, consistency, and shared direction, enabling us to deliver our data strategy effectively and at scale.

What you’ll do:

• Technical Mentorship: Act as the technical lead for all engineers working cross-functionally in an agile environment; act as a top-notch coder and expert in the domain, capable of deep diving into details of components and features, uplifting capability and shaping engineering maturity across the Domain.
• Architecture Partnership: Define and guide the technical architecture for complex, high impact data products and platforms. Manage Solution Architects and act as the natural bridge between Data Engineering and Data Architecture as well as colleagues in wider Technology.
• Standards Setting: Establish engineering and architectural patterns, coding standards, and best practices adopted across multiple squads.
• Design & Innovation: Translate sophisticated business and technical requirements into scalable, cloud native data solutions. Able to create and build frameworks to support CI/CD pipelines and future capability; drive adoption of new tools, technologies, and engineering approaches that support a cloud-agnostic, AI-ready future platform.
• Assurance & Excellence: Embed rigorous validation, profiling, reconciliation, and automated testing into all engineering work; lead monitoring, observability, and performance optimisation to ensure resilient, reliable data products.
• Strategic Influence: Partner with architects, product leaders, and senior stakeholders to shape roadmaps and platform direction. Work collaboratively with your Principal Engineer peers to ensure consistent and joined-up approaches to our biggest priorities and challenges. Communicating in both deeply technical and plain and simple terms.

What you’ll bring:

Essential criteria:

• Technical Mastery: Deep expertise in cloud data engineering, distributed processing, and enterprise-scale data architecture. Excellent GCP/Python and/or Node JS 8+ knowledge, and CI/CD experience (ideally with Jenkins).
• Advanced SQL: Master-level proficiency in SQL (ideally Big Query), with strong optimisation and performance-tuning skills. Experience following coding standards and performing peer code reviews.
• Data Modelling & Insight: Strong capability in designing intuitive, scalable data models and semantic layers aligned to business meaning; skilled in advanced data profiling, anomaly detection, and statistical reasoning to ensure data integrity.
• Collaboration: Able to influence senior stakeholders, simplify complex concepts, and build strong cross-functional relationships.
• Technical Leadership: Expert in data quality frameworks, governance standards, and secure handling of sensitive data; connects engineering choices to long-term platform strategy, organisational goals, and future scalability.
• Understanding: Uses deep business context within the specific Domain to shape proactive, value-driven engineering decisions; also equipped with first-class communication skills, able to…