Data Engineer (Principal/Lead)

Are you a Principal Engineer who thrives on building high-scale, external-facing products rather than just internal dashboards?

We are partnering with a global leader in scientific software whose enterprise platforms power critical innovations worldwide. They are looking for a Principal Data Engineer who brings sharp technical ownership and great energy to a collaborative team.

Location: London/ 2 days on-site

The Reality of the Challenge:

This isn't about managing internal data pipelines for a single company. You will be architecting and scaling a core data platform designed to serve over 200+ enterprise clients simultaneously. We need someone who understands the high stakes of a true commercial SaaS product lifecycle—where system uptime, rigorous testing, and avoiding outages are everything.

What You’ll Do:

• Build for True Scale: Architect and scale modern data platforms capable of serving 200+ external enterprise clients simultaneously without breaking a sweat.
• Own the Product Lifecycle: Drive engineering excellence from initial requirements and refinement through to heavy testing and production deployment.
• Drive Team Energy: Bring a proactive, direct, and high-energy approach to the engineering team—helping unblock complex architecture challenges and elevating the people around you.
• Bridge Software & Data: Treat data infrastructure like a world-class software product, ensuring high availability, observability, and seamless performance.
• The SaaS Mindset: You must have a proven track record of building data architectures for commercial SaaS products, not just internal company BI. You understand the classic software development lifecycle and how to build to prevent system outages.
• The Data Stack: Deep, hands-on production experience with Databricks is preferred. (If your background is in Snowflake or BigQuery, that works perfectly too—provided it's paired with AWS).
• The Cloud Ecosystem: AWS is highly preferred. If your expertise lies in another ecosystem like GCP, you’ll need to have it tightly paired with Databricks experience.
• The Vibe: You are collaborative, direct, and bring great energy to the room. You enjoy solving tough problems alongside a sharp team.

Why This Role?

You get to work on a product that makes a genuine global impact, operating with the agility of a focused product team. It’s a high-trust, hybrid environment where your architectural choices directly impact the product's commercial success.