Principal Data Engineer

CarTrawler

Tech that takes you places We’re CarTrawler, the global travel tech company behind seamless connections between people, places and possibilities. From powering car rental to creating smarter ways to move, we make travel smoother for millions worldwide. Our culture is built on curiosity, collaboration and craic where every idea counts and every journey matters. Ready to make an impact? Let’s go places together. CarTrawler’s Product & Technology team brings innovation to every journey. Together, our engineers, product managers, designers and analysts use creativity, data and AI innovation to solve challenges that make travel easier for everyone. From building seamless digital experiences to powering smarter automation behind the scenes, we’re shaping a future where technology and people work hand in hand. Your Journey starts here! Driving the evolution of our data platform, this role blends deep technical expertise with leadership to shape how data powers decisions across the business. You’ll design and build scalable, high-performing data solutions while guiding the team toward engineering excellence. Working at the intersection of data, AI and product innovation, you’ll influence architecture, accelerate delivery and elevate standards. This is a hands-on leadership role where your impact will be felt in both the codebase and the capability of the team. If you’re passionate about building robust systems and mentoring others to do the same, this is your opportunity to make a lasting mark.

CreateFuture

Who we are CreateFuture is fast becoming the UK’s most recognisable digital consultancy, with years of experience building digital products and services for major organisations whilst putting our people first. We have offices in the centre of Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, and London as well as remote employees located throughout the country.    We are a team of creators - whether that’s code, project plans, go to market strategies, culture initiatives, marketing campaigns, large language models or people policies. And together, with our clients, we create the future. This has seen us collaborate and partner across a multitude of industries and sectors, with the likes of PayPal, adidas, Natwest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert, to name just a few.   Our reputation as a partner determined to deliver high-quality, robust and thoughtful products has enabled us to scale to over 500 people in the last couple of years, and it is our amazing people - along with the safe, supportive and friendly culture we have built - that makes CreateFuture a great place to work. Don’t just take our word for it though, we have been recognised by Best Workplaces UK multiple years in a row - across a number of categories - and our employee exit rate is astonishingly low.  Join us on our journey… Let’s create something awesome, together, today. About the role and team: ABOUT THE ROLE AND TEAM We're looking for a Principal Data Engineer to join our Data Practice and own the technical direction of our iGaming data engineering capability. You'll work with some of the world's largest betting and gaming operators — organisations processing hundreds of millions of events per day across sportsbook, casino, exchange, and lottery platforms. A Principal at Create Future operates above the delivery line as well as within it. You'll define how we solve the hardest data engineering problems in iGaming: petabyte-scale migrations from legacy on-premises estates, sub-millisecond event pipelines, settlement reconciliation at bookmaker scale, and the data foundations that keep operators compliant with gambling regulators globally. You'll influence the shape of engagements from pre-sales through to delivery, grow the engineering talent around you, and be a recognisable voice for Create Future in the iGaming market.   WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP * Defining and owning the data engineering architecture patterns Create Future uses across iGaming engagements — migration frameworks, streaming architectures, data integrity standards, and Lakehouse design * Acting as the most senior technical authority on client engagements — making critical architecture decisions, resolving design disputes, and setting the bar for quality * Reviewing and signing off technical designs produced by Lead and Senior engineers across active engagements * Identifying and driving the adoption of new tooling, patterns, and AWS services that improve delivery outcomes across the iGaming practice   DELIVERY * Leading the technical design and execution of large-scale data migrations — moving high-volume transactional and event data from on-premises or legacy cloud estates to AWS, without loss of fidelity or operational continuity * Architecting real-time and near-real-time data pipelines for sportsbook and in-play use cases — odds feeds, market events, bet placement streams, and settlement pipelines — where latency and correctness are non-negotiable * Designing and enforcing data integrity frameworks across betting, trading, and customer data domains — including reconciliation between source and target systems, anomaly detection, and audit trail requirements * Overseeing the implementation of regulatory and compliance reporting pipelines that meet the requirements of the UK Gambling Commission and international licensing bodies * Working with AWS services including S3, Glue, Lambda, Athena, Redshift, RDS, Kinesis, MSK, Lake Formation, Step Functions, and MWAA — selecting the right tool for each problem rather than defaulting to a stack   PRACTICE AND PEOPLE * Mentoring and growing Lead and Senior Data Engineers — through code review, pairing, architecture sessions, and career conversations * Building the iGaming data engineering playbook: reusable patterns, accelerators, and reference architectures that reduce time-to-value on new engagements * Contributing to hiring — defining what great looks like for data engineering roles and playing an active part in assessment * Representing Create Future externally — at industry events, in technical blog posts, and in client-facing settings — as a credible voice on iGaming data engineering   COMMERCIAL * Shaping and leading technical responses to iGaming opportunities — scoping complex engagements, writing architecture proposals, and presenting to senior client stakeholders * Identifying expansion opportunities within existing client relationships — spotting data engineering problems we can help solve and framing them as propositions * Partnering with AWS on joint go-to-market activity where relevant, leveraging Create Future's Advanced Partner status   WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR DEEP IGAMING DOMAIN EXPERTISE * Extensive experience working in or closely with sportsbook, exchange, or casino platforms — you understand the data models, operational pressures, and regulatory constraints from the inside * You've led or made decisive contributions to large-scale data migrations in iGaming — moving live betting, customer, or trading data at scale while maintaining integrity and uptime * You've designed or owned low-latency data pipelines where correctness and throughput are both critical — odds ingestion, in-play event streams, bet settlement, or equivalent * You understand what data integrity means in a regulated gambling context: reconciliation, audit trails, lineage, and the consequences of getting it wrong   AWS DATA ENGINEERING MASTERY * AWS is your primary cloud and you can design across the full data engineering stack — from ingestion and streaming through to warehousing, serving, and cost optimisation * You have deep experience with streaming architectures — Kinesis, Kafka/MSK, Flink, or Spark Streaming — and know when each is the right choice * You can model the cost implications of architecture decisions and advise clients on trade-offs between throughput, latency, durability, and spend * AWS certification at professional or specialty level is strongly preferred   ENGINEERING EXCELLENCE * Mastery of Python, SQL, and Spark — and strong opinions on how they should be used in production data pipelines * Deep experience with dbt, Airflow, or equivalent orchestration — including how to build pipelines that are testable, observable, and operationally sound * Strong understanding of data quality engineering — not just validation rules, but how to build systems that detect and surface integrity issues before they reach consumers * Comfortable with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, AWS CDK) and treating data platform infrastructure as a first-class engineering concern   CONSULTANCY AND LEADERSHIP * You've operated at Principal or equivalent level — making architectural decisions that affect multiple teams, and being accountable for their outcomes * You're comfortable in C-suite and VP-level client conversations, translating technical complexity into business risk and opportunity * You can hold a room on a difficult technical topic and reach a decision — not just present options * You've grown engineering talent around you and take it seriously as a leadership responsibility   TECH SNAPSHOT Primary cloud AWS — Glue, Lambda, Athena, S3, Redshift, RDS, Kinesis, MSK, Lake Formation, Step Functions, MWAA Streaming AWS Kinesis, Apache Kafka / MSK, Apache Flink, Spark Streaming Languages Python, SQL, Spark Pipeline tools dbt, Airflow / AWS MWAA, AWS Glue Platforms Databricks, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift Data quality Great Expectations, dbt tests, reconciliation frameworks, data observability tooling IaC / DevOps Terraform, AWS CDK Certification AWS Professional or Specialty level strongly preferred WHAT WE’LL OFFER YOU: We trust people to do their best work. That means flexibility over rigid rules, impact over activity, and real investment in your growth both professionally and personally. You’ll be part of a supportive, and friendly culture, surrounded by smart, curious people who care deeply about what they do. We offer flexible working, including hybrid and remote options. Our office hubs are located in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London and Bulgaria, with occasional travel to client sites or CreateFuture offices when needed. We trust you to manage your time balancing collaboration with client time and focused work. What matters is the impact you have, not how busy you look. OUR HIRING PROCESS We try to keep our hiring process clear, fair and respectful of your time. We aim to get back to everyone who applies and we will be upfront about where you are in the process. It usually looks like this: * Call with our Talent Acquisition Team  * Role specific capability interview  Depending on the role, we might also ask you to do a short presentation, a practical or technical task or have a values focused conversation. We will explain what is involved before anything happens. INCLUSION AT CREATEFUTURE  We believe diverse teams build better workplaces and better products. We want CreateFuture to be a place where people feel able to be themselves and do their best work. If you need any adjustments or support during the application process, just. We will do what we can to help. We look forward to your application!

Thoughtworks

Principal data engineers at Thoughtworks, are strategic leaders who spearhead data engineering initiatives, tackle complex business challenges and uncover transformative insights. They possess a deep understanding of a client's business ecosystem and partner with executives to align technology strategies with business objectives. By contextualizing emerging trends and Thoughtworks' exploration, they expand the impact of data engineering within the client organization. They draw upon their profound expertise in developing modern data architectures and infrastructure for the management of data applications. Effective collaboration is paramount, as data engineers adeptly convey their discoveries to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. They stay abreast of industry advancements, ensure data quality and security, and provide mentorship to junior team members. At Thoughtworks, data engineers leverage their deep technical knowledge to solve complex business problems, making a significant impact on client success. JOB RESPONSIBILITIES * You will collaborate with sales and pre-sales to clarify requirements and design viable solutions and drive pursuits with technical stakeholders. * You will establish a clear vision and direction for the data paradigm/practices, aligning it with the overall business strategy. * You will collaborate with executive level stakeholders to understand their strategic objectives and identify opportunities to leverage data and data quality. * You will consult on complex data platform programs, synchronizing cross-cutting architectural concerns and providing client-facing technical leadership and guidance as a data subject matter expert. * You will be responsible to create, design and develop intricate data processing pipelines, addressing clients' most challenging problems. * You will collaborate with data scientists to design scalable implementation and production of their models. * You will write clean and iterative code based on TDD and leverage various continuous delivery practices to deploy, support and operate data pipelines. * You will design and implement the strategy around data governance, data security and data privacy to support business and compliance requirements. * You will represent Thoughtworks in various online and offline forums, including events and conferences. JOB QUALIFICATIONS TECHNICAL SKILLS * You must have extensive pre-sales experience and a proven ability to independently drive complex pursuits and create winning commercial proposals. * You have experience leading enterprise data strategy, system design, and the end-to-end implementation of large-scale technical solutions. * You are a native-level German speaker (C1) who is comfortable driving consensus and managing expectations with senior technical stakeholders. * You possess hands-on experience in system design using Domain-Driven Design principles for complex enterprise organizations with multiple domains. * Working with data excites you; you have designed Big Data architectures, built and operated data pipelines, and managed data storage within distributed systems. * You have a deep understanding of data modeling and practical experience with modern data engineering tools, platforms, and cloud warehousing solutions. * You are a "hands-on" leader—equally happy writing production-grade code as you are leading a team to implement a vision. * You have built and deployed large-scale data pipelines and data-centric applications using distributed storage and processing platforms in production environments. * You have experience designing and developing streaming solutions (Cloud or On-premise) leveraging leading technologies and industry best practices. * You have experience implementing data governance and security policies, complemented by a solid understanding of MLOps and data science concepts. PROFESSIONAL SKILLS * You understand the importance of stakeholder management and can easily liaise between clients and other key stakeholders throughout projects, ensuring buy-in and gaining trust along the way. * You are resilient in ambiguous situations and can adapt your role to approach challenges from multiple perspectives. * You don’t shy away from risks or conflicts, instead you take them on and skillfully manage them. * You coach, mentor and motivate others and you aspire to influence teammates to take positive action and accountability for their work. * You enjoy influencing others and always advocate for technical excellence while being open to change when needed. * You are a proven leader with a track record of encouraging teammates in their professional development and relationships. * Cultivating strong partnerships comes naturally to you; You understand the importance of relationship building and how it can bring new opportunities to our business. OTHER THINGS TO KNOW LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT There is no one-size-fits-all career path at Thoughtworks: however you want to develop your career is entirely up to you. But we also balance autonomy with the strength of our cultivation culture. This means your career is supported by interactive tools, numerous development programs and teammates who want to help you grow. We see value in helping each other be our best and that extends to empowering our employees in their career journeys. RESPONSIBLE USE OF AI IN RECRUITMENT At Thoughtworks, we use AI tools to support our recruitment team with administrative tasks such as drafting communications, scheduling interviews and writing job descriptions. Crucially, our AI tools do not screen, assess, rank or make hiring decisions. Every application is reviewed by our team and all selection decisions are made exclusively by our interviewers and hiring managers. We are committed to fairness and responsible AI. We actively manage our AI systems by testing, monitoring for biased outcomes and implementing mitigation measures. We hold our third-party vendors to these same high standards through a rigorous governance process. For additional information, please see our full Thoughtworks AI Policy for Recruitment. ABOUT THOUGHTWORKS Thoughtworks is a dynamic and inclusive community of bright and supportive colleagues who are revolutionizing tech. As a leading technology consultancy, we’re pushing boundaries through our purposeful and impactful work. For 30+ years, we’ve delivered extraordinary impact together with our clients by helping them solve complex business problems with technology as the differentiator. Bring your brilliant expertise and commitment for continuous learning to Thoughtworks. Together, let’s be extraordinary. #LI-Onsite See here our AI policy.