Principal Data Engineer

Working at CreateFuture

CreateFuture is an AI-native consulting partner where people do work that matters and are supported to do it well. We work alongside organisations such as PayPal, adidas, NatWest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert, building digital products and services that make a difference while always putting people first.

We’re a team of creators. We write code, shape delivery, build go-to-market strategies, develop AI solutions and create the practices that support our people. We work side by side with our clients, challenging what’s not working and helping them to build the future. Our commitment to craft, quality, and culture has helped us scale to over 600 people in just a few years.

CreateFuture is a Great Place to Work-Certified™ company and has won Best Workplaces UK multiple years in a row.

Join us on our journey. Let’s create tomorrow, together, today.

About the role and team:

We're looking for a Principal Data Engineer to join our Data Practice and lead the technical direction of our engineering capability. You'll work across a portfolio of clients spanning multiple industries, helping some of the most ambitious organisations in the UK solve their hardest data problems.A Principal at CreateFuture operates above the delivery line as well as within it. You'll define how we solve the hardest data engineering problems across our client base, influence the shape of engagements from pre-sales through to delivery, grow the data talent around you, and be a recognisable voice for CreateFuture in the data engineering community.

What you'll be doing:

Technical leadership

Defining and owning the data engineering architecture patterns CreateFuture uses across client engagements — migration frameworks, streaming architectures, data integrity standards, and Lakehouse design

Acting as the most senior technical authority on client engagements — making critical architecture decisions, resolving design disputes, and setting the bar for quality

Reviewing and signing off technical designs produced by Lead and Senior engineers across active engagements

Identifying and driving the adoption of new tooling, patterns, and cloud services that improve delivery outcomes across the data practice

Delivery

Leading the technical design and execution of large-scale data migrations — moving high-volume transactional and event data from on-premises or legacy cloud estates to modern cloud platforms, without loss of fidelity or operational continuity

Architecting real-time and near-real-time data pipelines for clients with demanding latency and correctness requirements

Designing and enforcing data integrity frameworks across critical data domains — including reconciliation between source and target systems, anomaly detection, and audit trail requirements

Overseeing the implementation of regulatory and compliance reporting pipelines where relevant to a client's sector

Working with cloud data services (e.g. S3, Glue, Lambda, Athena, Redshift, RDS, Kinesis, MSK, Lake Formation, Step Functions, MWAA, or their equivalents on other platforms) — selecting the right tool for each problem rather than defaulting to a stack

Practice and people

Mentoring and growing Lead and Senior Data Engineers — through code review, pairing, architecture sessions, and career conversations

Building CreateFuture's data engineering playbook: reusable patterns, accelerators, and reference architectures that reduce time-to-value on new engagements

Contributing to hiring — defining what great looks like for data engineering roles and playing an active part in assessment

Representing CreateFuture externally — at industry events, in technical blog posts, and in client-facing settings — as a credible voice on data engineering

Working closely with the Head of Data to enable the growth of the right skills and capabilities to meet client needs.

Commercial

Shaping and leading technical responses to opportunities — scoping complex engagements, writing architecture proposals, and presenting to senior client stakeholders

Identifying expansion opportunities within existing client relationships — spotting data engineering problems we can help solve and framing them as propositions

Partnering with cloud providers on joint go-to-market activity where relevant, leveraging CreateFuture's partner status

What we're looking for:

Consulting background

You've spent a significant part of your career in a consultancy, professional services, or client-facing delivery environment — you know how to build trust quickly, work across ambiguous or fast-changing requirements, and deliver under commercial pressure

You're comfortable moving between clients and industries, ramping up on new domains quickly rather than relying on years of embedded context

You've shaped and sold technical work — writing proposals, scoping engagements, and presenting architecture decisions to client stakeholders

You understand the difference between "good engineering" and "good engineering for this client, this budget, this timeline" — and can navigate that trade-off transparently

Cloud data engineering mastery

You can design across the full data engineering stack — from ingestion and streaming through to warehousing, serving, and cost optimisation — on a major cloud platform (AWS strongly preferred)

You have deep experience with streaming architectures — Kinesis, Kafka/MSK, Flink, or Spark Streaming — and know when each is the right choice

You can model the cost implications of architecture decisions and advise clients on trade-offs between throughput, latency, durability, and spend

Cloud certification at professional or specialty level is strongly preferred

Engineering excellence

Mastery of Python, SQL, and Spark — and strong opinions on how they should be used in production data pipelines

Deep experience with dbt, Airflow, or equivalent orchestration — including how to build pipelines that are testable, observable, and operationally sound

Strong understanding of data quality engineering — not just validation rules, but how to build systems that detect and surface integrity issues before they reach consumers

Comfortable with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, AWS CDK) and treating data platform infrastructure as a first-class engineering concern

Leadership

You've operated at Principal or equivalent level — making architectural decisions that affect multiple teams, and being accountable for their outcomes

You're comfortable in C-suite and VP-level client conversations, translating technical complexity into business risk and opportunity

You can hold a room on a difficult technical topic and reach a decision — not just present options

You've grown engineering talent around you and take it seriously as a leadership responsibility

What we’ll offer you:

We trust people to do their best work. That means flexibility over rigid rules, impact over activity, and real investment in your growth both professionally and personally. You’ll be part of a supportive, and friendly culture, surrounded by smart, curious people who care deeply about what they do.

We offer flexible working, including hybrid and remote options. Our office hubs are located in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London and Bulgaria, with occasional travel to client sites or CreateFuture offices when needed.

We trust you to manage your time balancing collaboration with client time and focused work. What matters is the impact you have, not how busy you look.

Our hiring process

We try to keep our hiring process clear, fair and respectful of your time. We aim to get back to everyone who applies and we will be upfront about where you are in the process.

It usually looks like this:

Call with our Talent Acquisition Team

Role specific capability interview

Depending on the role, we might also ask you to do a short presentation, a practical or technical task or have a values focus