Principal Engineer (Data Engineering - NGDP)

What is the challenge?

As a Principal Engineer for Compare the Market, you will not only be strongly aligned to the technical and product leadership in their domain, but also CtM wide technical leadership, contributing to and setting the technical direction for the domain, whilst ensuring that vision remains aligned to the rest of the organisation. Primarily a strategic role, you will understand the whole of a domain’s service estate, how it fits into the wider CtM technology vision, how it drives commercial outcomes and how it satisfies our customers’ needs, ensuring that we deliver on the promised customer outcomes.

You will be responsible for a domain’s technology strategy (including future plans and roadmaps) and the decisions we make around technology, that they are fit for purpose over a longer time frame, that any risk is well understood and plans for the whole lifecycle of our services, tools and products. You must also understand macro technology trends, be capable of assessing third party technologies and taking part in the vendor selection process.

Our environment is one that has 190+ technical people in a company that champions Pair Programming, innovation days and a challenge culture, as well as uses a plethora of tools and technologies such as AWS, Kafka, Java, Python, Scala, Docker, Terraform, MongoDB and more – this will be a great opportunity to learn and grow your career and allow you to have a significant impact on our business.

What will it take to be successful as a Principal Engineer?

As an experienced Principal Engineer, you should be able to demonstrate some of the key responsibilities & skills below:

• Has a broad impact across their domain and the wider technology organisation, raises the bar for engineering excellence across the board

• Creates alignment across teams in their domain, and with other domains, ensuring that best practice and architectural decisions are well understood within CtM technology

• Capable of setting medium to long term strategies for our services and products, ensuring that the CtM technology vision is incorporated into domain designs and roadmaps

• Provides vision, direction, advice and guidance on the approach to delivering services and products, takes a holistic view across the entire domain and aligns decisions with CtM’s technology vision.

• Advocate of engineering excellence within the domain and CtM technology, helps the organization shift left on testing and security, contributes to technology wide engineering standards, processes and tools.

• Plays a leading role in, and helps shape the forums for the assessment and adoption of standards, processes and tools across the whole of CtM

• Takes a risk-based approach to decision making, guides other engineers in taking the same approach, makes sure that our risk controls are considered when delivering software

• Understands the regulatory framework in which CtM operates and how it applies to their role and other engineering roles

Essential Skills:

• Experience in defining a technical vision, getting stakeholder buy-in and making complex technical change happen across a large data technology estate

• Proven experience making architectural decisions that meet customer and commercial needs

• Self-starter, strong influencing and negotiation skills, strong written and verbal communication skills, able to manage non-technical and technical stakeholder relationships

• Helps shape the forums for the assessment and adoption of standards, processes and tools across the whole of CtM

• Demonstrable experience architecting and delivering modern data platforms at scale using AWS, Kafka, EMR, Redshift and Spark or equivalent technologies

Desirable Skills:

• Experience working with and supporting data science and machine learning platforms

• Lakehouse design and architecture

• Datamesh

• Databricks

• Platform as a service principles

Why choose us?

You might already know us - we’re the ones with the Meerkats! Compare the Market has helped revolutionise the insurance market and we have been growing rapidly since starting in 2006.

We are on a mission to transform the comparison industry, moving beyond endless forms and generic search results, to a highly personalised, service-led experience. In order to do so, we recognise that we need to consistently deliver seamless, personalised customer experiences through a connected data and technology ecosystem.

Diversity and Inclusion

We’re a diverse community of dedicated, innovative and talented professionals. With an inclusive and open workplace, we encourage our people to create and share ideas – supporting their growth and celebrating their uniqueness.

Flexible working

We understand the importance of achieving a healthy lifestyle balance, whether it’s working remotely or flexibly we have an environment where people are empowered to embrace flexible working in a way that works for them and for the business.

’We are committed to offering equal chances to you throughout the application process, so if you require any special adjustments to be made, please let us know. We will work with you to make any appropriate arrangements.’