Principal Snowflake Data Engineer - Contract (Manchester)

Insight Investment; Manchester; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Insight Investment in Manchester is seeking a Principal Snowflake Data Engineer to lead the design and delivery of a scalable cloud data platform built on Snowflake. You will shape the data strategy, drive governance, and enable democratized access to high-quality data for analytics and decision-making.

You will work in an Agile data platform team, collaborating with stakeholders across the business, and coordinating with cloud engineering on IaC, security, and best practices.

Qualifications

• Expertise designing and implementing scalable data platforms on Snowflake.
• Experience with ELT pipelines and Snowpark; PySpark/Polars/Dask are welcome.
• Proficiency in Python, SQL, and data transformation frameworks (DBT in particular).
• Strong collaboration in Agile teams and ability to communicate complex ideas.
• Experience with CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions/TeamCity/Artifactory).

Responsibilities

• Contribute to design and implementation of a scalable data platform using Snowflake.
• Evolve the Insight Data Strategy and communicate outcomes across leadership and teams.
• Set firm-wide standards for data ingestion, governance, transformation, and democratization.
• Optimize ELT pipelines and enable advanced analytics and AI tooling.
• Collaborate with cloud engineering on IaC and ensure alignment with security policies.
• Stay updated on Snowflake and big data trends to recommend improvements.

Skills

Snowflake

PySpark

Polars

DBT

Python

SQL

CI/CD

GitHub Actions

TeamCity

Artifactory

Java/Scala

Kafka

Collibra

Apache Iceberg

Apache Arrow

Pyspark

AI engineering

Tools

Snowpark

GitHub Actions

TeamCity

Artifactory

Docker

Job description

We are looking for an experienced Principal Snowflake Data Engineer to join our growing team building our strategic data

platform as we look to adopt best in class data governance and democratise data around the business. The successful candidate will play a pivotal role in shaping and executing our data strategy, leveraging our data assets to the full, elevating our decision-making, streamlining processes, and drive innovation within our organisation.

You will be part of the long-standing Data Platform team using Agile methods to deliver solutions on top of our cloud platform. Starting with Snowflake as a foundational component, we will look to integrate other technologies and grow capability to meet the demands of the business. You will work closely with a variety of business areas and be involved in all aspects of the Secure System Development Lifecycle (S-SDLC).

We operate in a collaborative and inclusive environment, where each team member's expertise is valued. Our culture emphasizes open communication, mutual support, and a shared commitment to delivering exceptional results. We foster a learning culture, providing opportunities for growth and innovation while maintaining high standards of professionalism and integrity.

Role Responsibilities

• Contribute to the solution design and implementation of a robust and scalable data platform using
• Snowflake with complementary tooling to meet the organisation's needs.
• Help evolve the Insight Data Strategy, communicate outcomes from a leadership through to team level.
• Set the firm-wide standards and conventions for ingesting, governing, transforming, persisting, and democratising data.
• Provide expertise in ELT pipeline performance optimisation
• Enable the adoption of advanced analytics & AI by configuring best-in-class tooling.
• Evolve the usage of infrastructure-as-code in collaboration with cloud engineering.
• Align technical designs with internal data, privacy, security and compliance policies.
• Stay abreast of industry trends and emerging technologies related to Snowflake and big data processing, recommending relevant advancements for consideration.

Experience Required

• Snowflake (Warehouses, Tasks/Streams, Snowpipe, Snowpark, Distributed UDF/Sproc, Time Travel, Cloning)
• Demonstratable experience of delivering end to end pipelines in Snowpark (transferable frameworks such as Pyspark, Polars or Dask are also welcome).
• DBT including Jinja templating or equivalent transformation frameworks
• Python including build tools, test automation frameworks and engineering best practices
• SQL (including Snowflake-optimised SQL)
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions / TeamCity / Artifactory).
• Demonstrate initiative and independence to solve problems.
• Be able to communicate abstract or complex ideas or solutions effectively.
• Stand by software engineering principles around quality and doing things the right way.
• Experience working in and with Agile teams performing iterative development.
• Ability to collaborate with end users, stakeholders, teams, and team members.
• Have a constant desire to improve knowledge and drive adoption of new tech or approaches within the teams.
• Own mistakes and work with your colleagues to redress them, learn from them and make improvements for the long-term.
• Docker
• Java / Scala
• Event streaming technologies such as Kafka, Pulsar, or Azure Event Hub
• Integration with Collibra
• Apache Iceberg
• Apache Arrow
• Pyspark
• AI engineering (Snowflake AI, Langchain, Llamaindex, Pinecone, etc)

Insight is committed to being an inclusive employer and encourages applications from all suitably qualified applicants irrespective of background, circumstances, age, disability, gender identity, ethnicity, religion or belief, sexual orientation or other factors protected by federal, state and/or local laws. If you are a candidate with a disability, or are assisting a candidate with a disability, and require an accommodation to apply for one of our jobs, please email us at [e-mail]

About Insight Investment

Insight Investment is a leading asset manager focused on designing investment solutions to meet its clients' needs. Founded in 2002, Insight's collaborative approach has delivered both investment performance and growth in assets under management. Insight manages assets across its core liability-driven investment, risk management, full-spectrum fixed income, currency and absolute return capabilities. Insight has a global network of operations in the UK, Ireland, Germany, US, Japan and Australia. More information about Insight Investment can be found at: https://www.insightinvestment.com/corporate/