Principal Data Engineer

Principal Data Engineer
12 Month Contract
Inside IR35 - Up to £1000 per day (DOE)
Manchester, UK - Hybrid - 4 days a week onsite
Morson Edge are partnered with a leading investment management firm who are looking for an experienced Principal Data Engineer to join their established Data Platform team and play a key role in shaping the organisation's strategic data platform.
You'll combine hands-on engineering with technical leadership, helping define how data is ingested, transformed, governed and made accessible across the business. Snowflake is at the heart of the platform, alongside a growing ecosystem of modern data technologies.
The Role
You'll be responsible for:
Designing and delivering scalable data platform solutions using Snowflake and complementary technologies.
Building and optimising end-to-end ELT/data pipelines, with a focus on performance, reliability and maintainability.
Helping shape data strategy, engineering standards and best practices around governance and data democratisation.
Supporting the adoption of advanced analytics, AI and machine learning capabilities.
Developing Infrastructure as Code alongside Cloud Engineering.
Ensuring solutions meet data privacy, security and compliance requirements.
Working collaboratively within an Agile environment and across the wider business.
Keeping up with emerging technologies and driving continuous improvement across the platform.
What Theyre Looking For
Strong experience with:
Snowflake - Warehouses, Streams/Tasks, Snowpipe, Snowpark, UDFs/Stored Procedures, Time Travel and Cloning.
Snowpark and end-to-end pipeline development. Experience with PySpark, Polars or Dask is also valuable.
Python, including testing, build tooling and engineering best practices.
SQL, including Snowflake-optimised SQL.
dbt, including Jinja templating, or equivalent transformation frameworks.
CI/CD, ideally with GitHub Actions, TeamCity or Artifactory.
Agile software/data engineering environments and modern engineering practices.
Our client is also looking for someone who can work independently, communicate complex technical ideas clearly, collaborate effectively with stakeholders and champion better ways of working.
Nice to Have
Experience with Docker, Java/Scala, Kafka, Pulsar, Azure Event Hub, Collibra, Apache Iceberg, Apache Arrow, PySpark or AI engineering technologies such as Snowflake AI, LangChain, LlamaIndex or Pinecone would be advantageous.
This is a great opportunity to join a collaborative team and have genuine influence over the development of a modern data platform, with exposure across data engineering, analytics and AI.
Only candidates who live within a reasonable commuting distance from Manchester will be considered
Candidates must reside in the UK and have full working rights, sponsorship is NOT available