Principal Data Engineer & Practice Lead — Remote-First

YLD; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Private health care

Pension

Annual leave

Training allowance

Hardware allowance

Mental Health support

Bonus

Laptop

Referral schemes

Job summary

YLD, a London-based software engineering and data consultancy, is seeking a senior data leader to shape and deliver data engagements for clients. You will sit with leadership, own hands-on delivery, and help build YLD's external data reputation through events and writing.

You’ll lead by example in data engineering, mentoring teams, and guiding client conversations, while collaborating with sales to proactively position data capabilities.

Qualifications

• Hands-on data engineering with production systems.
• Experience leading a data team or function.
• Comfortable presenting to senior client stakeholders.
• Consulting or agency background is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

• Hands-on data engineering work, pipelines, transformations, and infra.
• Adapt to client contexts: legacy migrations, lakehouse projects, transformations needing rescue.
• Guide the wider team and unblock technical problems as delivery scales.
• Define internal standards for data work: testing, docs, project structure, code reviews.
• Mentor and grow data engineers across the company.
• Join client meetings as the data authority, shape proposals and scope.
• Act as escalation point on live data engagements.
• Travel to client sites for workshops and events, representing YLD at data events.
• Own growth of data practice, reputation, and headcount over time.
• Contribute to hiring and attracting strong data engineers.
• Represent YLD at data events and in the wider community.

Skills

Technical leadership

Client facing

Data engineering

Data architecture

Tools

Airflow

Dagster

Snowflake

BigQuery

Databricks

dbt

Spark

Fivetran

Airbyte

Job description

YLD, a London-based software engineering and data consultancy, is seeking a senior data leader to shape and deliver data engagements for clients. You will sit with leadership, own hands-on delivery, and help build YLD's external data reputation through events and writing.

You’ll lead by example in data engineering, mentoring teams, and guiding client conversations, while collaborating with sales to proactively position data capabilities.