Principal Data %26 AI Engineer

Compare the Market; London; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a leading company as a Principal AI & Data Engineer, pivotal in shaping data architecture and AI solutions. You will collaborate across teams to deliver innovative applications, drive engineering excellence, and mentor future leaders. Enjoy a supportive work culture and numerous benefits.

Benefits

Generous holiday allowance

Private healthcare

Electric car scheme

Paid development days

Qualifications

• 5+ years in data engineering or similar.
• Experience with distributed data tooling.
• Strong coding skills in Python and SQL.

Responsibilities

• Define AI data architecture connecting data pipelines and ML workflows.
• Lead cross-team technical design sessions.
• Ensure compliance with data quality and model monitoring standards.

Skills

Python

SQL

Data Engineering

Machine Learning

Distributed Systems

Tools

Spark

Kafka

Airflow

Job description

Our purpose is to make great financial decision making a breeze for everyone, and that purpose drives us every day.
It’s why we’re on a mission to create an automated quoting engine, with the simplest of experiences, wrapped in a brand everyone loves!
We change lives by making it simple to switch and save money and that’s why good things happen when you meerkat.

We’d love you to be part of our journey!
As a Principal AI & Data Engineer, you’ll play a pivotal role in shaping how we design, build, and integrate the platforms, dataflows, and services that power applied AI across our business. This role sits within the Data & AI Solutions team and acts as a technical leader for the whole team, working closely with data science, machine learning engineering, and analytics. While our core platform and engineering teams sit outside this function, your role will be to ensure architectural alignment, shared standards, and a cohesive approach to data and AI delivery across all teams—including visibility into data quality, system reliability, and the monitoring of AI solutions in production.

Everyone is welcome!
We have a culture of creativity. We approach our work passionately, improve constantly and celebrate our wins at every turn. We are an inclusive workplace and our employees are comfortable bringing their authentic, whole selves to work. Everyone is welcome. Be you.
This means we’re excited to hear from people with a range of skills, experiences and ideas. We don’t expect you to tick all the boxes, but would love to hear what makes you great for this role.

Some of the great things you’ll do:
Architecture & System Design
• Define and evolve our AI data architecture—connecting data pipelines, ML workflows, and platform services
• Identify key dependencies, integration points, and data flows across teams, systems, and domains
• Establish and promote architectural patterns for ML/AI deployment, feature computation, and model serving
• Define and support patterns for monitoring data and AI solutions, including model drift, data quality, pipeline reliability, and real-time observability
• Work with data scientists, MLEs, and platform teams to ensure solutions are modular, scalable, and maintainable
Technical Strategy & Delivery
• Lead technical design sessions across disciplines (Data Science, MLE, Data Platform, Software Engineering)
• Drive engineering excellence across batch, real-time, and streaming use cases
• Support end-to-end deployment of AI systems, from feature pipeline to real-time inference and feedback loops
• Influence decisions around technology choices, environments, orchestration tools, and observability
Collaboration & Influence
• Act as a technical bridge between Data & AI Solutions and other teams—ensuring data engineering, platform, and software teams are aligned on architecture, standards, and delivery patterns
• Help identify synergies across domains, and ensure architectural decisions enable velocity, reuse, and quality
• Collaborate with product, data, and platform leads to align delivery roadmaps and unblock execution
• Translate between technical detail and strategic value—helping leadership and peers see the bigger picture
Culture & Leadership
• Be a role model for modern engineering practices—advocating for automation, testing, standards, and performance
• Mentor engineers across the data and AI space, and elevate the overall technical bar through pairing, reviews, and knowledge sharing
• Contribute to internal engineering communities and help grow our culture of openness, autonomy, and technical excellence

What we’d like to see from you:
• Deep hands-on experience as a data engineer, streaming engineer, or data platform architect working in complex, distributed systems
• Strong coding and architecture skills in Python, SQL, and distributed data tooling (e.g. Spark, Kafka, Flink, DBT, Delta Lake, Airflow)
• Experience designing and deploying data applications for machine learning, real-time decisioning, or analytical products
• Proven ability to define cross-team architecture and lead technical alignment across domains
• Strong communication and influencing skills—able to simplify complexity and bring people with you
• Passion for system design, modern engineering standards, and building for resilience, reuse, and scale
• A background in software engineering, data infrastructure, or applied AI systems

There’s something for everyone.
We’re a place of opportunity. You’ll have the tools and autonomy to drive your own career, supported by a team of amazingly talented people.
And then there’s our benefits. For us, it’s not just about a competitive salary and hybrid working, we care about what matters to you. From a generous holiday allowance and private healthcare to an electric car scheme and paid development, wellbeing and CSR days, we’ve pretty much got you covered!

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