Principal Data Engineer (Azure SQL Server) to £90k

Are you a data technologist who enjoys taking ownership and working autonomously?

You could be progressing your career as a Principal Data Engineer at a rapidly scaling technology company that provides a fully managed IT service including security.

As Principal Data Engineer, you'll build and lead a global database capability, setting the standards, strategy and tooling to manage, secure and optimise customer database estates worldwide. Combining technical leadership with hands-on delivery, you'll establish best practices across assessment, monitoring, performance, backup, recovery and high availability, while growing a team of database engineers across EMEA, the Americas and APAC.

You'll own the database engineering roadmap, developing playbooks, automation and repeatable processes that scale across customers. Acting as product owner for database tooling, you'll work closely with platform developers to embed monitoring, automated remediation, capacity planning and operational improvements into the platform, reducing manual effort and improving reliability.

The role is customer facing, you'll be leading complex stabilisation and re-architecture programmes across technologies including SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle and cloud data platforms, tackling challenging performance, resilience and data architecture issues, guiding customers through modernisation and translating technical recommendations into clear business outcomes for senior stakeholders.

You'll also act as the final escalation point for critical database incidents, driving root cause analysis and lasting improvements.

Location / WFH:

You can work remotely from anywhere in the UK.

Please note: you must be UK based and have the right to work.

About you:

• You have strong database engineering / administration experience, including hands-on SQL Server expertise across performance tuning, query optimisation, blocking, deadlocks, memory, I/O and backup / recovery for multi-terabyte databases

• You have a good working knowledge of at least two other platforms, such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle or cloud-native data warehouses

• You have strong SSIS and SQL Agent experience, including refactoring legacy ETL and improving job resilience

• You have experience designing high availability, disaster recovery and workload separation, including within Standard edition licensing constraints

• You're familiar with modern data platforms and tooling, including Azure Data Lake, Parquet, Synapse, analytics services and managed ELT tools such as Fivetran

• You have experience of leading technical teams and translating expertise into standards, runbooks and automation

• You have excellent communication and client facing skills, with the ability to explain technical issues, business risks, solutions and costs to senior stakeholders

• You're comfortable inheriting complex legacy environments, prioritising stabilisation and driving practical improvements