Principal Data Engineer

About the role

Principal Data Engineers at [Employer hidden] are senior technical leaders who operate across multiple teams, embedding best practices, raising engineering standards, and enabling our most ambitious data, ML and AI initiatives

You will actively seek out the highest‑impact problems across multiple cross-functional squads, partnering closely with Machine Learning Engineers (MLEs), ML Engineering Managers, Product and Platform teams to ensure we build robust, scalable and future‑proof data foundations for ML‑driven products such as the Travel Assistant

Embedded Data Engineering (Embedded DE) is a core part of this role

You will work inside ML‑led teams, shaping architecture, guiding implementation, and ensuring alignment between Data Engineering and ML Engineering best practices across [Employer hidden]

Act as a technical authority across multiple teams, setting standards and patterns for data and ML‑adjacent infrastructure

Embed with ML teams to design, build and evolve data platforms supporting AI and ML workloads

Influence technical direction without direct line management responsibility

Partner with Data Engineering teams outside of ML to build a community and share best practices and findings across all areas

Identify systemic issues and proactively drive improvements across the data ecosystem

Look for short term and strategic opportunities to enhance core platforms with new self-serve enablement features for ML and DE

Partnering with MLEs to design data pipelines supporting model training, inference and experimentation

Designing and reviewing architectures for ML‑ready data platforms

Building and optimising data pipelines using SQL, Spark or Ray and Python

Defining best practices for orchestration using Airflow or similar tools

Supporting API‑driven and event‑based data access patterns

Working with AWS infrastructure such as ECS, vector databases and Bedrock APIs

Reviewing designs and code across teams to raise quality and consistency

Coaching engineers through pairing, design reviews and informal mentoring

Collaborating on innovative AI‑powered product features such as the Travel Assistant

Who you are

• Extensive experience as a Senior, Staff or Principal Data Engineer operating across teams
• Deep expertise in SQL and Python, with strong experience in Spark or similar tooling
• Strong understanding of orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow
• Experience designing data platforms for ML and AI workloads
• A track record of introducing new technologies and practices, and handling ambiguity and multiple stakeholders
• Hands‑on experience with AWS infrastructure (e.g. ECS, IAM, data storage, compute)
• Familiarity with vector databases and modern AI/ML APIs (e.g. Bedrock)
• Experience working closely with Machine Learning Engineers in production environments
• Strong system design skills and the ability to influence through technical leadership