Principal Data Engineer

WE’RE ON A MISSION TO BACK THE UK’S SMALL BUSINESSES LIKE NO ONE ELSE 🚀 Small businesses are the backbone of the economy, and we’re here to help them win. We’ve built a platform that uses clever data to get them the funding they need in minutes, not weeks. At Funding Circle, we have the restless energy of a fintech start-up with the stability of a public company. It’s a unique mix that gives Circlers the autonomy to take ownership and the scale to make an impact that truly counts. We’re a high-performing team that chooses to lift each other up. We challenge, we champion, and we have each other’s backs - because we know that when we stand together, we move faster and build better. The impact is real: Last year alone, the businesses on our platform generated £7.2bn for the UK economy 📈 Come and join a mission that matters! [Read our Impact Report https://www.fundingcircle.com/uk/impact] | [See our Trustpilot https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/fundingcircle.com] THE ROLE ⚡ 📍 London (Hybrid) | 🤝 2 days in the office | 💰 Competitive Salary + Benefits As Principal Data Engineer you are the primary technical authority for Funding Circle's Data Engineering and Data Platform architecture, designing innovative solutions on Snowflake and AWS. Reporting to the VP of Data and sitting on the Data Leadership Team, you lead the analysis, architecture, design and development of our Data and Analytics estate. You own the Data Platform strategy and the multi-phased roadmap to our Future State Data Platform, and you are the key technical team member advising on the migration to the Future State Data Platform. - Own the Data Platform strategy and execute the multi-phased roadmap for migrating to the Future State Data Platform on Snowflake and AWS, advising on migration architecture, transition states, historical data migration and legacy decommissioning. - Lead the architecture, design and development of scalable cloud data warehouse, lakehouse, streaming and analytics solutions. - Define ingestion, transformation and orchestration patterns, naming and structural conventions, and the publication boundary between Product Engineering and Data Engineering. - Identify, mitigate and resolve architectural bottlenecks, control weaknesses and technical debt across the data ecosystem. - Own the Data as a Product Community of Practice and the standards that bind every Data Product: metadata and data contract specifications, output port and schema design, data product versioning, DQ requirements, SLA and SLO declarations, and semantic layer conventions - Champion data quality, lineage, observability and governance, ensuring checks, SLAs and alerting are expressed as code and monitored in production rather than asserted on a page. - As a key member of the Data Architecture Review Board, work on and carry formal decision rights over data architecture decisions, ensuring every proposal is engineering-viable, consistent with the platform direction and properly recorded. WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR 🌱 We value deep expertise, but a growth mindset and good energy are what really make our team click. We’re a group that chooses to lift each other up and think smart every day. - A minimum of 10 years of experience in Data & Analytics, with experience in Staff, Principal (or equivalent) roles in Data Engineering, Data Architecture, or Data Platform, ideally within digital products or FinTech. - Extensive hands-on experience designing, building and operating cloud data platforms on Snowflake and AWS, and a proven track record leading complex, large-scale migrations from legacy systems. - Experience designing data products across source-aligned, aggregate and consumer-aligned patterns. - Proven ability to architect and scale mod