CreateFuture on cord

CreateFuture

Principal Data Engineer

External position
Hiring internally for CreateFuture?
Software Development · Consultancy · Technology
Create Tomorrow, Together, Today
Active
over 6 months ago
Posted
2 days ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
2 days ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Data Engineer
Experience level: Senior, Lead, Leadership
Core skills considered: Python, SQL, Spark, Data Pipelines, Data Architecture
Other skills considered: Cloud Computing, AWS, Terraform, Airflow

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

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

Company Benefits

  • We believe our employees should enjoy their leave how and when they want, that’s why we give you 35 days (inc. bank holidays) to book when you wish
  • Support for your health and wellbeing with access to fast and effective private medical insurance with Vitality
  • Our enhanced maternity, paternity, adoption and shared parental leave ensures you get to spend quality time with your new family members
  • We ensure our employees feel more secure and supported with their finances by partnering with Bippit to provide confidential professional financial coaching, workshops and resources
  • Some of the latest tech equipment, including headphones and more, as well as a range of tools to do your job comfortably
  • If you like getting involved in social events at work, we host regular optional virtual and in-person events like cook-alongs, virtual quizzes and more
  • For the avid cyclists, take advantage of our cycle-to-work scheme
  • Through the wellbeing app, YuLife, you’ll get access to many benefits including group life insurance, a 24/7 EAP service and both physical and mental wellbeing support
  • Invest in your future by opting into our salary sacrifice pension scheme
Principal Data Engineer at CreateFuture
Position posted 2 days ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
Alex Yeates on cord
Message Alex Yeates at Starling Bank
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