Principal Data Engineer — Remote Data Platform Lead

Colibri Digital; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first working

Job summary

Colibri Digital is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to bridge complex data architectures with strategic business value. This client-facing role is a high-impact leadership position that ensures resilient, scalable data platforms aligned with long-term business goals.

You will lead multi-year technology roadmaps, drive large-scale data architectures, and own incident management, governance, and risk controls while mentoring teams and promoting data excellence across the organization.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in a principal engineering role.
• Extensive experience with cloud data platforms such as Azure or AWS, with a focus on Databricks.

Responsibilities

• Act as the primary strategic partner to client business owners, aligning technical data solutions with corporate goals while championing reliability and data quality.
• Drive the development of complex, large-scale data architectures and multi-year technology roadmaps.
• Oversee delivery performance, ensuring quality and resilience of data pipelines and managing capacity planning.
• Lead triage and resolution of platform incidents, owning root-cause prevention and client communication.
• Implement governance frameworks and compliance controls, acting as lead on risk mitigation.
• Champion knowledge sharing and establish best practices across communities of practice.

Skills

Principal engineering

Azure/AWS

Databricks

PySpark

SparkSQL

SQL

Data modelling

ETL tools

Data governance

Data security

Stakeholder management

Communication

Tools

Databricks

Apache Spark

SQL tooling

Job description

Colibri Digital is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to bridge complex data architectures with strategic business value. This client-facing role is a high-impact leadership position that ensures resilient, scalable data platforms aligned with long-term business goals.

You will lead multi-year technology roadmaps, drive large-scale data architectures, and own incident management, governance, and risk controls while mentoring teams and promoting data excellence across the organization.