Principal Data Engineer

We’re 1st Central, a market-leading insurance company utilising smart data and technology at pace. Rapid growth has been based on giving our 1.4 million customers exactly what they want: great value insurance with an excellent service. And that’s the same for our colleagues too; we won Insurance Employer of the Year at the British Insurance Awards 2024 and our Glassdoor score is pretty mega too!

We’re currently recruiting for a Principal Data Engineer to join 1st Central, acting as a key bridge between business opportunities and technical solutions. This is a hands-on technical role, where you’ll provide leadership on data solutions across both project delivery and ongoing data products. 

You’ll take responsibility for defining the technical direction of the data platform and solution design, working closely with architects to ensure alignment with overall platform patterns and standards and will also provide clarity and technical direction to engineers building solutions against agreed designs.  

While this role does not include direct line management responsibilities, you’ll play an important role in supporting, coaching and mentoring data engineers, ensuring delivery meets the required standards of quality and integrity. 

Core skills were looking for to succeed in the role: 

• Data Engineering: As a Principal Data Engineer, you’ll bring expertise across all stages of the SDLC, alongside strong coaching, leadership and mentoring skills. 

• Cloud Platforms: You’ll have deep experience with Microsoft Azure data platforms, ensuring best practices are followed to build and maintain a well-managed, high-performing platform. 
• Technical Skills: Strong experience using Microsoft Azure, Apache Spark and Databricks for scalable, high-performance data processing.

• Agile Working: You’ll understand how to develop solutions iteratively within agile teams, always focusing on delivering business value. 

• Business Intelligence: With BI as the primary consumer of our data solutions, you’ll have a strong grasp of reporting, dashboards, and advanced modelling. 

• Problem Solving & Thinking: A creative problem solver who thrives on creating simplicity out of complexity with ability to bring together multiple different views and perspectives to create agreed designs and solutions. 

This is a flexible hybrid working role with occasional visits to our offices, when required, in either Salford Quays, Manchester, Haywards Heath, West Sussex, or Guernsey. We offer great flexibility in working patterns and a company-wide culture to be proud of. 

What’s involved: 

• You’ll be responsible for creating or guiding the low-level design of data solutions, taking high level solution architecture artefacts and translating them into workable designs and work packages. 

• You’ll be responsible for the quality of the overall data platform(s), ensuring that data pipelines and database solutions are implemented effectively from a re-use and performance optimisation perspective.

• You’ll be responsible for coding standards, low level design and ingestion patterns for the data platform(s), that all users, including data engineers follow. 

• You’ll develop high complexity, secure, governed, high quality, efficient data pipelines from a variety of on and off premise, internal and external data sources. 

• You’ll set the standards and ensure that data is cleansed, mapped, transformed and optimised for storage to meet requirements for business and technical use cases.

• You’ll design and build of data observability and data quality by design into all Data pipelines, promoting self-testing pipelines that proactively identify processing issues or discrepancies.

• You’ll build solutions that pipe transform data into data lake storage areas, physical database models and reporting structures across data lake, data warehouse, business intelligence systems and analytics applications. 

• You’ll build physical data models that are appropriately designed to meet business needs and optimise storage requirements, ensuring maximum re-use.

• You’ll carry out unit testing of own code, peer testing of others code to ensure appropriate quality, and be responsible for completeness and integrity of solutions delivered on the data platform(s).

• You’ll ensure that effective, and appropriate documentation that brings transparency and understandability are in place for all content on the data platform(s). 

• You’ll coach and mentor Senior Data Engineers, Data Engineers & Associate Data Engineers.

• You’ll create high complexity BI solutions including data mart, semantic layer, and reporting & visualisation solutions in recognised BI tools such as Power BI.

Experience & knowledge: 

• Requires extensive experience of designing and building end to end data solutions (10 years +).

• Exceptional at building strong, effective relationships with people from different disciplines. 

• Experience of carrying out data engineering design and build activities using agile working practices (such as Scrum or Kanban). 

• Databricks – Designing and optimising scalable data pipelines on Databricks using PySpark and Spark SQL. 

• Data Lake / Lakehouse – Experience implementing Delta Lake-based lakehouse architectures on ADLS Gen2, including optimised storage design, hierarchical namespace, Medallion architecture and patterns for scalable batch and streaming workloads.  

• Synapse Analytics - Experience designing and implementing tables, schemas, stored procedures and data models within Synapse dedicated SQL pools, with knowledge of Synapse architecture and performance. 

• Version Control & CI/CD – Expertise in Git-based workflows and CI/CD for data platforms, including branching strategies and automated deployments via YAML pipelines. 

• Unit Testing – Experience implementing unit testing for data pipelines to ensure code quality and reliability. 

• Data Architecture – Experience designing and implementing data models within modern lakehouse architectures, including dimensional modelling (Kimball) for scalable analytics. 

• Data Quality – experience embedding data quality by design into data pipelines, incorporating validation rules, cleansing, and transformation logic to deliver trusted, high-quality data products. 

• Azure Cloud Architecture – Experience designing and governing secure, scalable Azure environments, leveraging network isolation (Virtual Network, Private Link, Firewall), identity and access controls (RBAC, PIM), and effective resource organisation (subscriptions, resource groups, tagging, cost management). 

• Microsoft Entra ID – Experience in implementing identity and access management for cloud data platforms, including security groups and service principals for secure authentication and authorisation. 

• Infrastructure-as-Code – Experience designing and implementing infrastructure using declarative approaches (e.g. Terraform, Bicep), enabling automated, repeatable, and consistent cloud deployments. 

• Programming – Expertise in Python and SQL for data engineering, with experience leveraging .NET, PowerShell and other languages to support automation, integration, and platform operations. 

• Keen and active interest in the use of data in the wider industry, with practical knowledge and networks. 

Skills: 

• A creative problem solver who thrives on creating simplicity out of complexity. 

• A passion for people and creating environments that enable others to flourish. 

• Resilient and comfortable prioritising in demanding situations. 

• Highly trustworthy and able to operate with integrity and discretion at all times. 

• Energetic and proactive, and someone who motivates others by their “can do, will do” attitude. 

• Able to operate with minimal brief, and a fast-moving set of changing priorities. 

• Ability to bring together multiple different views and perspectives to create agreed designs and solutions. 

If you’re looking for a role where you can combine hands-on technical expertise with real influence and impact, we’d love you to join us and help shape what’s next. 

What can we do for you?

People first. Always. We’re passionate about our colleagues and know the best people deserve an extraordinary working environment. We owe it to them so that’s what we offer. Our workplaces are energetic, inspirational, supportive. To get a taste of the advantages you’ll enjoy, take a look at all our perks in full here. 

Intrigued? Our Talent team can tell you everything you need to know about what we want and what we’re offering, so feel free to get in touch.