Principal Data Engineer (Data Practice Lead)

Location: London, United Kingdom. Remote-first working is available, with regular travel to client sites, workshops, and industry events.

Company

hirify.global is a software engineering and product design consultancy founded in 2013, headquartered in London, with delivery teams in Lisbon and Porto.

What you will do

• Perform hands-on data engineering across pipelines, transformation layers, models, and supporting infrastructure.
• Deliver data solutions across legacy warehouse migrations, greenfield lakehouses, and transformation platforms.
• Act as the technical authority in client and prospect meetings, shaping proposals, pitches, and engagement scope.
• Set internal standards for testing, documentation, project structure, code review, and data reliability.
• Mentor data engineers and guide teams through complex technical decisions and escalations.
• Build hirify.global's data practice through hiring, sales support, external events, and community activity.

Requirements

• Strong background as a data engineer or data lead with a track record of technical leadership.
• Client- or stakeholder-facing experience, with the ability to present to senior stakeholders and translate engineering constraints into business terms.
• Production experience with SQL, typed and testable Python, data modelling, transformation architecture, and pipeline design.
• Experience with data testing, observability, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, governance, lineage, access control, and cost optimisation.
• Platform fluency across tools such as Airflow, Dagster, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Fivetran, Airbyte, dbt, and Spark.
• Experience with AI-native engineering workflows and constructs such as RAG, semantic search, evaluations, and guardrails.

Nice to have

• Consulting or agency experience.
• Existing public presence in the data community.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-first environment with flexible working and work-life balance.
• Private health care, company pension scheme, and enhanced paid maternity and paternity leave.
• 25 days of annual holiday excluding public holidays.
• £2,000 annual training and conference allowance plus £300 additional hardware allowance.
• Mental health support, company laptop, performance-related bonus, and referral schemes.
• Values focused on continuous growth, inclusion, honesty, ethical relationships, inspiring solutions, and collaboration.

Hiring process

• Screening call with the Talent team.
• Introductory conversation and technical conversation with engineering and data leadership.
• Final interview with the leadership team.