Principal Data Engineer

About This Opportunity

We are representing a confidential application security organization seeking a Principal Data Engineer to join their Belfast team. Our client is building a unified data platform that serves multiple product lines, enabling secure and high-quality insights across their DevSecOps solutions. This is a hands-on leadership role where you'll define the architecture and operational standards for production data systems at scale.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and build-out of cross-product data services from a governed data plane
• Define customer data plane models including canonical identifiers, shared dimensions, and consistent facts
• Build and operationalize ingestion patterns for batch, streaming, and event data with repeatable onboarding processes
• Own operational playbooks for data reliability: contracts, quality checks, lineage, monitoring, and incident response
• Implement access methods including curated datasets, secure query interfaces, and product-ready data APIs
• Productize customer-facing data products with versioning, documentation, and clear ownership
• Design data models for both operational systems (RDS) and analytics stores (columnar/OLAP), optimizing performance and cost
• Deliver data products that power ML workflows with trusted training datasets and feature-ready outputs
• Enable AI automation through reliable, low-latency, governed data products for automated workflows
• Partner with product, engineering, and security stakeholders to align data products with roadmap priorities
• Raise technical standards through architecture reviews and mentoring while remaining hands-on

What We're Looking For

Required:

• Significant experience building and operating production data platforms at scale with on-call ownership
• Strong SQL and Python skills for building pipelines, services, and automation
• Hands-on experience running cloud systems on AWS and Google Cloud (compute, storage, networking, IAM)
• Practical experience with operational databases (RDS-style) and analytics stores (columnar/OLAP) including performance tuning
• Strong data modeling ability: schema evolution, conformed dimensions, and "one source of truth" metric definitions
• Track record delivering data products that other teams or customers depend on with clear contracts and reliability expectations
• Ability to make engineering tradeoffs across latency, accuracy, cost, and security without creating brittle complexity
• Experience with lakehouse patterns and open table formats including governance and maintenance
• Experience with orchestration and streaming systems in production (batch + real-time) and managing backfills safely
• Familiarity with ML data needs (training/serving splits, feature-ready datasets) and AI-adjacent workflows

Preferred:

• Experience building self-service data platforms (catalog, discoverability, access controls) for multiple teams
• Experience in regulated or security-sensitive environments including retention, auditing, and data access controls

Work Model:

• Location: Belfast, UK
• Work model: Hybrid (details to be confirmed)
• Reports to: VP of Data Engineering
• Collaboration hours: Flexible with overlap across UK and US time zones
• Travel: Minimal

How We Work With You

As a Get A Job.ai candidate, you'll apply through our platform where our talent team will review your profile and conduct an initial screening. If there's a strong match, we'll submit your application to our client with your permission. Please do not contact the client directly—we manage all communication and coordination to ensure the best experience for everyone involved.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process and are competitive with market rates for Principal-level data engineering roles in Belfast.

Get A Job.ai is an equal opportunity recruiter. We consider all applicants without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity or expression, age, disability, sexual orientation, veteran or military service status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.