Principal Data Engineer

About Us

The Company: Dotdigital is a thriving global community of passionate, dedicated professionals, committed to the collective success of the organization and its clients. Our core principles of innovation, teamwork, and client-focused solutions drive us to approach challenges with a growth mindset and take ownership of our work. At Dotdigital, collaboration and curiosity pave the way for meaningful connections and learning opportunities with diverse peers. Our work environment encourages knowledge sharing, fosters exploration, and cherishes creative ideas. Combined, these guide us towards a shared vision in which brands around the world exceed customer expectations through the adoption of responsible marketing practices.

The Product: Dotdigital is an all-in-one customer experience and data platform (CXDP) that empowers marketing teams to exceed customer expectations with highly personalized cross-channel journeys. With Dotdigital, marketers can seamlessly unify, enrich, and segment customer data. Breaking down data silos, Dotdigital streamlines decision-making and paves the way for marketing creativity that delivers customer engagement at scale. With powerful AI capabilities, Dotdigital makes it easy to automate deeply personalized experiences across web, email, SMS, WhatsApp, chat, push, social, ads, and more.

About the Role

We are on the lookout for a Principal Data Engineer to help define and lead the next generation of our data platform and data capabilities. You’ll play a key role in building scalable, resilient and intelligent data systems that power real time services, insights, products features and decisions across Dotdigital.

As a Principal Data Engineer, you will be instrumental in driving the architecture, development and delivery of our data platform. You will lead key initiatives, provide technical direction and collaborate with product, analytics and data science teams to ensure data value is realised across the entire ecosystem. Working across the entire data lifecycle, you will help shape how data is collected, processed and consumed across Dotdigital.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and implementation of scalable, secure and resilient data systems across streaming, batch and real-time use cases.
• Architect data pipelines, model and storage solutions that power analytical and product use cases; using primarily Python and SQL via orchestration tooling that run workloads in the cloud.
• Leverage AI to automate both data processing and engineering processes.
• Assure and drive best practices relating to data infrastructure, governance, security and observability.
• Work with technologists across multiple teams to deliver coherent features and data outcomes.
• Support the data team to help adopt data engineering principles.
• Identify, validate and promote new tools and technologies that improve the performance and stability of data services.

About the Technology

We leverage the following technologies within our data platform:

• Azure Cloud
• Databricks
• Databricks Delta
• Prefect
• ClickHouse

Day to day you will use the following programming languages/frameworks and tools:

• Python
• Fast API
• Terraform
• PySpark
• GitHub
• Claude Code

Familiarity with the following technologies will also be useful:

• Kafka Streaming
• Event Hubs
• SQL Server
• MongoDB

About You

Technical Expertise

• Extensive experience delivering python-based projects in the data engineering space.
• Extensive experience working with SQL and NoSQL database technologies.
• Proven experience with modern data warehousing and large-scale data processing tools.
• Hands on experience with data orchestration tools.
• Experience using cloud environments (e.g. Azure, AWS, GCP) to process, store and surface large scale data.
• Experience using Kafka or similar event-based architectures.
• Strong grasp of data architecture and data modelling principles for both OLAP and OLTP workloads.
• Capable in the wider software development lifecycle in terms of agile ways of working and continuous integration/deployment of data solutions.

Engineering Leadership

• Experience as a lead or Principal Engineer on large-scale data initiative or product builds.
• Demonstrated ability to architect data systems and data structures for high volume, high throughput systems.
• Proven experience leading data platform modernisation or cloud migration projects.
• Comfortable taking ownership of difficult data problems and driving them to resolution.

Bonus

• Experience using ClickHouse as part of a data pipeline and analytics solution.
• Experience using Databricks or similar data platforms.
• Experience building AI agents to automate data engineering workflows

Interview Process

• 15 min Screening Call with Talent Team
• Stage 1: Role deep dive with hiring manager(s)
• Stage 2: Technical interview with data team

Some of Our Global Benefits

• Parental leave
• Medical benefits
• Paid sick leave
• Dotdigital day
• Share reward
• Wellbeing reward
• Wellbeing Days
• Loyalty reward
• DEI commitment

As an equal opportunities employer we are committed to equality in all its practices with regard to race, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, or sexual orientation. If you have any additional requirements or adjustments to assist an application then please don't hesitate to contact us and advise us how we can best support you.

Legal statement

No agencies/recruiters please. We are only accepting applications directly from the applicants. If you are a recruiter, please refrain from reaching out to our staff about this position. Anything contrary will be treated as unsolicited approach under the applicable data protection law.

Department

Product & Technology

Locations

South Africa, Remote, UK, Poland

Remote status

Fully Remote