Principal Data Engineer (Energy SaaS)

Location: United Kingdom, remote. Remote-first working environment with offices in London and Nottingham.

Company

hirify.global builds cloud-native SaaS software that helps energy retailers automate operations, improve billing accuracy, enhance customer experience, and use AI-driven insights.

What you will do

• Own the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for the data ecosystem across the Data Platform, Data Products, Margin Intelligence, and ML/AI Platform.
• Lead a pragmatic data mesh model that enables domain teams to produce, govern, and consume trustworthy data products.
• Drive architectural decisions through technical leadership and Architecture Decision Records.
• Establish standards for event-driven architectures, schema governance, data lifecycle management, CI/CD, quality, observability, lineage, metadata, and cost attribution.
• Design secure, scalable customer and partner data access through APIs, event streams, open table formats, and AI-driven access patterns.
• Provide hands-on leadership on complex engineering challenges and mentor Staff and Senior Engineers.

Requirements

• Extensive Data Engineering experience with a strong record of leading architecture and technical strategy across multiple teams or domains.
• Experience operating at Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, or equivalent technical leadership level.
• Deep expertise designing and operating modern data platforms and lakehouse architectures on a major cloud provider, ideally AWS.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including programming, distributed systems, and SQL.
• Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures, event streaming platforms, and schema governance technologies such as Kafka, Kinesis, Schema Registry, and Avro.
• Experience implementing data mesh, data product, or domain-oriented data ownership models.
• Strong knowledge of data contracts, metadata management, cataloguing, data lineage, and data quality frameworks.
• Experience balancing self-service data platform capabilities with effective controls and standards.
• Understanding of data security, privacy, classification, and access management principles.
• Experience sharing data externally through Apache Iceberg or similar open table formats, plus excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.

Nice to have

• Experience supporting Machine Learning and AI platforms, including MLOps and AI-driven product development.
• Knowledge of the energy industry or other highly regulated sectors.
• Experience building platforms for agentic AI, MCP servers, or emerging AI consumption patterns.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-first working environment with regular team-wide and company-wide events.
• 25 days of holiday plus bank holidays, with the option to buy or sell five additional annual leave days per year.
• Vitality Health Insurance with private healthcare, virtual GP access, mental-health support, and wellbeing perks.
• Pension with a 5% matched contribution.
• Two volunteering days per year.