[Remote] Principal Data Engineer

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Arbor Education is dedicated to transforming the educational landscape by providing innovative management tools for schools. As a Principal Data Engineer, you will drive the architecture and technical strategy for data, ensuring efficient data flow from transactional systems to analytical insights while collaborating with various teams to achieve strategic business objectives.ResponsibilitiesDefine and evangelise target architectures that bridge our transactional, analytical, and AI systems, ensuring our data remains a competitive advantageBe a leader for our end-to-end data lifecycle, from OLTP schema design and migrations to OLAP governance, platform and analyticsPartner 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 goalsLead 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 gainsArchitect the future infrastructure required for LLM orchestration, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and real-time model inference at scaleMentor and coach Technical Leads/Senior Engineers on architectural and engineering excellence, continually raising our bar and supporting career growthAct as a role model for technical leadership — work with pace, be pragmatic, and stay laser focused on outcomes not outputHead up architectural reviews for your domain and ensure all designs meet Arbor’s quality, reliability, security and compliance standardsCollaborate with Staff Engineers and Principal Engineers to shape Arbor’s broader technology strategy, working outside your domain as neededPartner with Engineering Management to help grow teams, identify and resolve systemic bottlenecks, ensuring the success of our strategic goalsSkillsExtensive experience overseeing data architecture and a track record of delivering iterative outcomes across one or more OLAP domainsStrong 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 developmentExamples of communication and influencing across technical and non-technical audiences to achieve positive outcomesAn ability to support the growth of engineers and technical leads whilst still delivering value across distributed, cross-functional teamsDemonstrable experience working in an ownership culture where quality, performance, observability, and security are core responsibilities for every engineerAn understanding and opinion on how AI-first engineering will change the data ecosystem and ways of working, ideally with worked examplesExamples 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 lawsPlatform financial acumen - demonstrable experience of optimising SaaS platform spend, and the use of forecasting modelsAI/ML Engineering & MLOps, including model deployment/serving and monitoringExperience with federated learning and/or privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs)Direct experience with LLM Ops, including prompt engineering at scale, and token cost optimisationBenefitsA dedicated wellbeing team who champion initiatives such as mindfulness, lunch n learns, manager training, mental health first aid training and much more!32 days holiday (plus Bank Holidays). This is made up of 25 days annual leave plus 7 extra company wide days given over Easter, Summer & ChristmasLife Assurance paid out at 3x annual salaryComprehensive wellness benefit provided by AIG Smart Health, which provides a 24/7 virtual GP service, Mental health support, Counselling, and personalised Health ChecksPrivate Dental Insurance with BupaSalary sacrifice Pension provided by Scottish WidowsEnhanced maternity and adoption leave (20 weeks full pay) and paternity (6 weeks full pay) pay5 free return to work maternity coaching sessions, helping you adapt to this new exciting time of life!Access to services such as Calm and Bippit (financial wellbeing coaching)All of our roles champion flexible working and we are happy to discuss what this means to youSocial committees that plan team, office and company wide events to bring people together and celebrate successDedicated professional development training budget (CPD courses, upskilling resources, professional memberships etc)Volunteer with a charity of your choice for a day each yearDog friendly offices!Company OverviewArbor helps schools transform the way they work It was founded in 2011, and is headquartered in London, England, GBR, with a workforce of 201-500 employees. Its website is http://www.arbor-education.com/.