Principal Data Engineer (we have office locations in Cambridge, Leeds and London)

About the role

We’re looking for an experienced Principal Data Engineer with a proven track record of senior technical leadership across Genomics England’s data engineering capability.

This is a senior individual contributor role operating at Principal level, where you will set technical direction and influence data engineering strategy across complex, regulated, national scale clinical and research platforms.

You will shape how we design, build and operate scalable, secure and highly reliable data platforms. This includes defining standards, patterns and data engineering approaches that multiple teams will align to and deliver against.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will stay close to data engineering, code and delivery where it matters, while also operating at architectural and strategic level to guide direction, influence technical decisions, raise data engineering maturity, and build capability across the organisation.

Working across data engineering, data architecture, product and governance, you will ensure our data platforms are robust, interoperable and aligned to organisational and national priorities, including highly sensitive clinical and research data.

What you will be doing

• Setting technical direction and influencing data engineering standards across data platforms, pipelines and data products used by multiple teams
• Leading the design and delivery of complex, large scale data solutions across cloud and hybrid environments
• Influencing architectural direction for enterprise data platforms, including Lakehouse, distributed and event driven systems
• Acting as a technical authority across squads, influencing alignment to data engineering standards and data architectural principles
• Working closely with senior engineers, architects, bioinformaticians, data colleagues and product teams to influence delivery and technical decision making
• Ensuring all data engineering approaches meet strict governance, privacy, security and regulatory requirements
• Driving adoption and influencing use of modern engineering practices including DataOps, DevOps, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, automation and observability
• Improving platform resilience, performance and operational maturity across critical data systems
• Evaluating and influencing adoption of new tools, technologies and data engineering approaches where appropriate
• Mentoring experienced data engineers and influencing capability uplift across teams
• Contributing to organisation wide technical communities, standards and design governance

What we are looking for

• Proven experience operating at senior or Principal level in data engineering
• Strong track record of designing and successfully delivering enterprise scale data platforms and systems
• Deep experience with modern data architecture, cloud infrastructure and scalable data processing systems
• Strong hands-on programming experience, i.e. Python and SQL
• Strong expertise in data modelling, data lifecycle management, metadata and governance
• Experience working in complex regulated environments such as healthcare, genomics or research
• Strong understanding of security by design and handling highly sensitive data
• Proven ability to influence architectural and data engineering direction across multiple teams or domains
• Strong stakeholder engagement skills, with experience influencing senior technical and non-technical stakeholders in matrix environments

Desirable

• Experience with genomics, bioinformatics or clinical data platforms
• Familiarity with GA4GH, OMOP or FHIR standards
• Experience with orchestration tools such as Airflow, Prefect or AWS Glue
• Experience with modern data architecture patterns such as data mesh or Lakehouse approaches

This is a rare opportunity to define how data engineering operates at national scale in a regulated, mission driven organisation. As an experienced Principal Data Engineer with a strong and demonstrable track record, you will help set direction, shape standards others build to, and directly influence the maturity and reliability of critical data platforms, while staying close enough to the engineering to make a real hands-on impact.