Principal Data Engineer - Contract (Manchester)

We are looking for an experienced Principal Data Engineer to join our growing team building our strategic data platform as we look to adopt best in class data governance and democratise data around the business. The successful candidate will play a pivotal role in shaping and executing our data strategy, leveraging our data assets to the full, elevating our decision-making, streamlining processes, and drive innovation within our organisation. You will be part of the long-standing Data Platform team using Agile methods to deliver solutions on top of our cloud platform. Starting with Snowflake as a foundational component, we will look to integrate other technologies and grow capability to meet the demands of the business. You will work closely with a variety of business areas and be involved in all aspects of the Secure System Development Lifecycle (S-SDLC). We operate in a collaborative and inclusive environment, where each team member's expertise is valued. Our culture emphasizes open communication, mutual support, and a shared commitment to delivering exceptional results. We foster a learning culture, providing opportunities for growth and innovation while maintaining high standards of professionalism and integrity. Role Responsibilities Contribute to the solution design and implementation of a robust and scalable data platform using Snowflake with complementary tooling to meet the organisation's needs. Help evolve the Insight Data Strategy, communicate outcomes from a leadership through to team level. Set the firm-wide standards and conventions for ingesting, governing, transforming, persisting, and democratising data. Provide expertise in ELT pipeline performance optimisation Enable the adoption of advanced analytics & AI by configuring best-in-class tooling. Evolve the usage of infrastructure-as-code in collaboration with cloud engineering. Align technical designs with internal data, privacy, security and compliance policies. Stay abreast of industry trends and emerging technologies related to Snowflake and big data processing, recommending relevant advancements for consideration. Experience Required Snowflake (Warehouses, Tasks/Streams, Snowpipe, Snowpark, Distributed UDF/Sproc, Time Travel, Cloning) Demonstratable experience of delivering end to end pipelines in Snowpark (transferable frameworks such as Pyspark, Polars or Dask are also welcome). DBT including Jinja templating or equivalent transformation frameworks Python including build tools, test automation frameworks and engineering best practices SQL (including Snowflake-optimised SQL) Experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions / TeamCity / Artifactory). Demonstrate initiative and independence to solve problems. § Be able to communicate abstract or complex ideas or solutions effectively. § Stand by software engineering principles around quality and doing things the right way. Experience working in and with Agile teams performing iterative…