Principal Data Engineer

Principal Data Engineer - Data Platforms / Data Lakes / Cloud / Python - 6-Month Contract - £625 p/d Inside IR35 - London

A global digital media organisation are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join their Data Foundation & Product Analytics team on an initial 12-month contract. This role sits at the forefront of enterprise data strategy, engineering, and platform governance - and will be instrumental in shaping the next generation of data infrastructure within the business. This is a hybrid role (London-based) with flexibility in a fast-paced, multi-cloud, multiplatform environment.

You will partner with the Enterprise Data Lake and Governance teams, architecting robust data pipelines and platforms across cloud and on-prem ecosystems, whilst establishing and enforcing standards for data modelling, ensuring consistency in data quality.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect and lead the development of large-scale, secure, and resilient data lakes and pipelines using Data Lakes and Data Mesh concepts.
• Leading a small team including Developers, Data Scientists, Business Analysts
• Extensive experience using Python, SQL and AWS
• Define and enforce data architecture across mesh and domain-driven data products.
• Implement and govern real-time/batch processing (Kafka, Spark, Glue).
• Ensure strong metadata, cataloguing, and lineage practices across the enterprise.
• Lead teams of engineers across global hubs, mentoring and supporting high standards.
• Knowledge on data governance & security practices such as IAM, RBAC, Collibra, OpenMetadata, GDPR compliance