Data Engineer

📣 Principal Data Engineer

📍 UK – Fully Remote

🏢 Places for People

✨ Join a community that cares

Ready to shape the future of data at the UK’s leading Social Enterprise? Places for People is growing its Data & Platform Engineering function and we’re looking for a Principal Data Engineer to lead, influence, and innovate across a cutting-edge GCP Data Mesh platform.

Why this role matters

You’ll be the senior technical authority driving architecture, engineering strategy, and best practice across decentralised product domain squads—helping build a scalable, secure, future-proof data ecosystem.

What you’ll do

• Provide technical leadership across data product domains
• Architect & design robust, performant GCP-based data solutions
• Mentor & coach engineers, uplifting capability across the team
• Drive interoperability across the Data Mesh
• Implement strong governance, data quality & compliance frameworks
• Champion innovation, automation & continuous improvement
• Collaborate closely with platform engineers & data architects

What you’ll bring

• Extensive cloud data engineering experience, ideally in Google Cloud Platform
• Deep expertise in BigQuery, Dataflow, Composer/Airflow, Cloud Functions, Data Proc, Data Fusion, Data Stream
• Strong SQL & Python skills
• Background leading or mentoring data engineering teams
• Solid understanding of Data Mesh principles & domain-driven design
• Experience building Data Lakes/Warehouses and optimising complex queries
• Knowledge of governance: lineage, metadata, MDM, PII handling & data legislation
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum delivery environments

Benefits

• Competitive salary (annual review)
• 35 days holiday (option to buy/sell)
• Matched pension contributions up to 7%
• Healthcare cashback plan
• 2% annual bonus scheme
• Training & career development support
• Discounts across a wide range of retailers & services

Places for People is committed to inclusion and welcomes applicants from all backgrounds. Adjustments for the recruitment process are available on request.

Ready to make an impact and lead at scale?

Apply now on Haystack. 🚀