Principal Data Engineer

hackajob is collaborating with Arbor Education to connect them with exceptional professionals for this role. Location: Remote Salary: £100,000 - £120,000 About Us At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better. We believe in a future of work in schools where being challenged doesn’t mean being burnt out and overworked. Where data guides progress without overwhelming staff. And where everyone working in a school is reminded why they got into education every day. Our MIS and school management tools are already making a difference in over 12,000 schools and trusts. Giving time and power back to staff, turning data into clear, actionable insights, and supporting happier working days. At the heart of our brand is a recognition that the challenges schools face today aren’t just about efficiency, outputs and productivity - but about creating happier working lives for the people who drive education everyday: the staff. We want to make schools more joyful places to work, as well as learn. About The Role As a Principal Software Engineer you will help drive architecture and technical strategy for our Data domain, spanning the entire journey from transactional source to analytical insight. You will evolve how data is leveraged across Arbor, delivering value that ensures our OLAP and AI capabilities provide a competitive edge and our OLTP foundations are built for scale. It’s a wide impacting and exciting role, crucial for Arbor's next stage of growth. We’re looking for candidates who are highly collaborative, energised by complex problems, and have a proactive approach. You will work collaboratively with multiple teams, Technical Leads, Product Directors, and Engineering Leadership to deliver strategic business objectives, all while reimagining ways of working to ensure we stay at the forefront of the industry’s AI evolution. Core Responsibilities Define and evangelise target architectures that bridge our transactional, analytical, and AI systems, ensuring our data remains a competitive advantage. Be a leader for our end-to-end data lifecycle, from OLTP schema design and migrations to OLAP governance, platform and analytics. Partner with Technical Leads to provide hands-on guidance supporting feature delivery, tech debt paydown, and architecture improvements. (Hands-on for this role means staying close to the details but not necessarily coding) Collaborate with Product Directors to understand product vision and translate this into deliverables, aligning commercial and engineering goals. Lead our shift to an AI-First way of working, architecting the data foundations to enable AI in our products and championing the latest approaches to help drive productivity gains Architect the future infrastructure required for LLM orchestration, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and real-time model inference at scale Mentor and coach Technical Leads/Senior Engineers on architectural and engineering excellence, continually raising our bar and supporting career growth Act as a role model for technical leadership — work with pace, be pragmatic, and stay laser focused on outcomes not output Head up architectural reviews for your domain and ensure all designs meet Arbor’s quality, reliability, security and compliance standards. Collaborate with Staff Engineers and Principal Engineers to shape Arbor’s broader technology strategy, working outside your domain as needed Partner with Engineering Management to help grow teams, identify and resolve systemic bottlenecks, ensuring the success of our strategic goals Requirements About you Extensive experience overseeing data architecture and a track record of delivering iterative outcomes across one or more OLAP domains Strong understanding of data modelling techniques (Star, Medallion, etc) and distributed data systems within cloud-native environments (Snowflake, etc). Experience in building and leveraging unstructured data across disparate systems to enable product development. Examples of communication and influencing across technical and non-technical audiences to achieve positive outcomes. An ability to support the growth of engineers and technical leads whilst still delivering value across distributed, cross-functional teams. Demonstrable experience working in an ownership culture where quality, performance, observability, and security are core responsibilities for every engineer An understanding and opinion on how AI-first engineering will change the data ecosystem and ways of working, ideally with worked examples Examples of contributing to or leading technical communities of practice (e.g. chapters, guilds, architecture councils). Practical knowledge of DataOps principles, including CI/CD for data and the orchestration of complex pipelines (e.g., AWS, Debezium, Git, Infra as Code). Good commercial knowledge of data security standards, encryption at rest/transit, and relevant compliance laws. Platform financial acumen - demonstrable experience of optimising