Principal Data Engineer
Summary
Lead hands-on data engineering at British Airways in Heathrow: build, deploy, and run secure, scalable cloud-native data pipelines and products (Snowflake, AWS, DBT) with DevOps and CI/CD practices, while mentoring engineers, line-managing Senior Data Engineers, and ensuring a reliable, cost-efficient data platform.
In this role you lead hands-on data engineering within the data delivery teams, shaping data ingestion, storage and processing across the organisation. You will guide the lifecycle from development to deployment, monitoring, and improvement, applying DevOps practices. As a senior engineer, you’ll mentor others, build reusable components, and ensure a secure, observable, cost-efficient data platform. This is a high-impact role in a business-critical data ecosystem.
Pay / Benefits- staff travel benefits including unlimited basic and premium standby tickets
- up to 30 discounted Hotline airfares per year
- opportunities to take on new challenges across the business
- Lead build, test, and deployment of data pipelines for secure, scalable data delivery
- Maintain data products for availability, performance, and resilience with monitoring and incident resolution
- Assure code and automation scripts to manage data flows
- Conduct service reviews, health checks, and root cause analyses to improve reliability
- Set standards for data processing documentation and version control
- Support senior engineers with engineering patterns, coding standards, and automated testing
- Lead agile ceremonies, planning, and retrospectives for continuous improvement
- Define developer experience and streamline data integration with product teams
- Line manage Senior Data Engineers and participate in on-call rotation
- Excellent SQL development experience
- Extensive data ingestion, processing, and storage on cloud-native tooling
- Experience with Snowflake, AWS, DBT or equivalent PaaS/SaaS
- Enterprise data management and security at scale
- Knowledge of data modelling, optimisation, testing, and monitoring
- Experience supporting production data systems, CI/CD and agile workflows
- Information security principles and access control in data environments
- Degree or equivalent training in Computer Science, Engineering, or related discipline (desirable)
- delivers work reliably and with accountability
- collaborative problem-solving
- clear communication and stakeholder engagement
- SQL development
- data ingestion, processing and storage
- cloud-native tooling (Snowflake, AWS, DBT)
