Principal Data Engineer

The Principal Engineer is the Lead Technical Engineer for the tribe and resides at the tribe leadership level. The role holder is the recognised expert and go-to contact point for all technical and functional aspects of the tribe’s domain. You will be an all-rounder who can take the lead in new initiatives, live issues and future technical options.
 
The Principal Engineer works closely with the tribe’s Delivery Lead, Product Lead and the Solution/Enterprise Architects in developing the tribe’s roadmap, therein assessing engineering constraints and quality assurance gates. Such plans must align to the target architecture and engineering strategies. In that regard, the role holder is expected to contribute to and implement the best practices, standards and technical improvements as agreed by the Head of Capabilities and relevant chapter leads in the Tribe.
 
The Principal Engineer is passionate about adopting new industry best practices in concepts and methodologies. In this respect, they are very visible in both internal and external communities.

Working across and with the wider technology organization, they will help remove technology and engineering related impediments, resolve technical constraints and escalations, and be a champion for the technology excellence within the Business Technology Group.

Accountabilities

• Accountable for detailed design, engineering, and quality of the technical delivery of the Tribe
• Accountable for ensuring technical designs, solutions and capabilities support the delivery of the business strategy
• Accountable for ensuring that each technical solution follows architectural governance processes as set out by the CTO function and supports on ensuring that technology choices and implementations align with technology roadmaps and architecture strategy
• Accountable for driving continuous improvements, aligned to the engineering strategy to the processes for the Tribe resulting in increased efficiency, ongoing stability of production or enabling greater ROI.
• Accountable for managing the technical debt process and level resulting in ownership over specific epics that address technical debts ensuring that solutions do not result in uncontrolled technical debt.  

Responsibilities

• Providing leadership and mentoring to the engineering community within the Tribe
• Leading on the creation of technical solutions for the Tribe epics/stories, collaborating across the teams to ensure solutions are delivered to an agreed schedule and level of quality
• Providing estimates for user stories with a specific view on technical complexities and dependencies, supporting the Head of IT  and Delivery Leads with planning
• Providing technical leadership and engineering guidance to engineers in the Tribe resolving technical constraints and roadblocks faced by the Squads
• Owning technical risks/issues, and plans mitigation action at the Tribe level
• Owning remediation activities for service issues at the Tribe level
• Ensuring that the technical team is working to help achieve the Data strategy of Admiral UK and is an active contributor to the strategic agenda .
• Responsible for identifying and implementing continuous improvements to the engineering processes for the Tribe resulting in increased efficiency or enabling greater ROI

Key interactions

• Coaches Engineers and technical people in the Tribes
• Collaborates and consults with Architecture, specifically the assigned architecture leads
• Collaborates and consults with technical governance functions e.g. InfoSec, Data Governance etc.
• Collaborates and consults with Heads of Capabilities for engineering excellence
• Support Head of Product and Delivery Leads in Tribe level planning
• Dotted line into the Chief Engineer and is part of the extended leadership team.

Knowledge and Experience Required

• Extensive knowledge and experience of Engineering key technology components
• Knowledge and experience in design and development with some of the following:
  • Experience of GCP managed services such as Big Query, Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Cloud SQL, GKE, Composer, Anthos Service Mesh, GCP Networking/VPCs/Loadbalancing, IAM, Service Accounts
  • Knowledge of Data Integration and Management platforms, i.e. Wherescape Red & 3D, Collibra, GCP Data Catalog, Apache NIFI
  • Selected programming languages and scripting - SQL, Python, Java, Kotlin, Terraform
  • Other Data Platforms: Neo4J, GCP DataProc, BigTable, Datastore, Redis memorystore
  • Visualisation platforms: MicroStrategy, Looker
  • Machine Learning: Vertex AI, Kubeflow, Jupyter Notebooks
  • Code repository tools such as Azure DevOps, GitHub and GitLab
  • Code deployment tools such as, Jenkins, Maven, Helm, Nexus, or Team City
  • Spring and Spring boot frameworks
  • Microservices and containerisation tools such as Docker and Kubernetes

• Knowledge and experience with Line management through both coaching and mentoring techniques
• Experience operating within heavily regulated environments including external regulated consumer products and service offerings
• Extensive knowledge and experience using development and release toolsets
• Knowledge and experience with 3^rd party service providers including facilitation of RFP, onboarding, and performance management (design of SLA and overall KPI)
• Previous experience of collaborating with architecture functions in order to deliver solutions aligned with technology roadmaps and Enterprise Architecture strategies
• Previous experience of Scaled Agile practices and ways of working
• Experience and knowledge of CISO governance frameworks, standards, controls and auditing documentation covering both business and technology solutions currently within product backlogs  

Professional Training Requirements

• Specific domain, technology type qualifications dependent upon expected backlog technical outcomes (subject matter qualifications).
• Example for Cloud based professional qualification would be desirable.

Interview Process
There will be a two -stage interview process. Interviews will take place via MS Teams and will take place throughout July.

Salary, Benefits and Work-Life Balance

We do not have a set salary for this position, as it will be dependent on the successful candidate’s experience. We are happy to see CVs from all candidates who meet the requirements and will be happy to discuss the remuneration package.

At Admiral, we are proud to be a diverse business where we put our people and customers first. We have great benefits to ensure employees have a great work-life balance; it's one of the reasons we’re consistently voted one of the Sunday Times Best Big Companies to work for in the UK. We want you to have an element of freedom to define a working lifestyle that supports this, so accommodate flexible hours wherever possible.

All colleagues will receive 33 days holiday (including banks holidays) when they join us, and this will increase with length of service, up to a maximum of 38 days (including banks holidays). You also have the option to buy or sell up to five days of annual leave in addition to your allocation.

You can also view some of our other key benefits here.