Principal Data Engineer

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Ever wondered what it feels like to be a Principal Data Engineer in Netcompany?

Joining us as a
Principal Data Engineer
, you will lead a small, high-caliber team of Data Engineers within our Data Intelligence & AI practice, building the data foundations on which our clients’ analytics and AI ambitions depend. You will design and deliver cloud-native data lakes, lake houses and medallion-architecture platforms on Azure, AWS or Databricks — engineered from day one to be AI-ready, governed and economically sustainable at scale.

This is a hands‑on leadership role. You will stay close to the code and set the bar for engineering quality, while reshaping how the team delivers: embedding AI coding assistants and agentic workflows into everyday engineering practice to compress delivery cycles and raise the quality of what we ship. You will develop the engineers you lead into the next generation of technical leaders, and you will own client engagement delivery end‑to‑end — scope, commitments, risk and outcomes — as the accountable technical voice in front of the client.

As a Principal Data Engineer you will:

• Lead a small team of Cloud Data Management and Data Lake Engineers delivering client engagements — planning, prioritisation, code reviews and mentoring.
• Own delivery of your engagements end‑to‑end: scope, estimates, milestones, risks, quality and client communication.
• Design and build cloud‑native data lakes and lake houses (Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg) using medallion architecture on Azure, AWS or Databricks.
• Build and maintain robust ELT/ETL pipelines, data models, and data quality / observability controls, orchestrated with tools such as Apache Airflow, Prefect, Dagster or Databricks Workflows.
• Adopt and promote AI coding assistants and agentic workflows inside your team.
• Support the Data Analytics Lead on solution design, technical estimations and pre‑sales activities; align with sector / account stakeholders.
• Collaborate with AI/ML, BI and application teams , ensuring your work serves analytics, AI and operational use cases.
• Apply engineering best practices: version control, CI/CD for data, IaC, Data Ops, security and governance.

What would make you a fit for the role:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Data Science or a related field.
• 10+ years of experience in data engineering / cloud data management, including experience taking technical leadership of small teams or work streams.
• Hands‑on expertise with at least one major cloud data platform — Azure, AWS or Databricks — including data lake / lakehouse design and medallion architecture.
• Strong SQL and Python skills, plus solid experience with ELT/ETL, data modelling and Spark (or equivalent distributed processing).
• Hands‑on experience with workflow orchestration and open table formats.
• Practical experience designing for performance, cost, security and data quality in cloud environments.
• Track record of delivering production data platform engagements, ideally cloud‑native data lakes / lake houses.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, and a coaching mindset for the engineers you lead.

Being a part of the Netcompany team, you will be provided with:

• The opportunity to work in a modern environment & in…