Principal Data Engineer (14 Month FTC)

About the role

You will join the Operations Delivery Intelligence directorate at British Airways as a technical leader for data engineering. In this 14‑month fixed‑term position you will help design, build and operate secure, scalable data platforms that power critical decision‑making across the airline.

Key responsibilities

• Lead data engineering best‑practice across delivery teams.
• Design, build, test and deploy secure, scalable data pipelines.
• Maintain and operate data products, ensuring availability, performance and resilience.
• Provide code‑quality assurance and automation for data flows.
• Conduct service reviews, health checks and root‑cause analysis to improve reliability.
• Set standards for data processing documentation and version control.
• Coach engineers on patterns, coding standards and automated testing.
• Lead agile ceremonies, delivery planning and retrospectives.
• Define and improve developer experience by resolving data processing issues.
• Line‑manage Senior Data Engineers and support their development.
• Participate in an on‑call rota for live data products.

Required profile

• Strong hands‑on technical leadership in data engineering.
• Deep understanding of cloud‑based data ingestion, processing and storage techniques.
• Expert knowledge of data processing, testing and monitoring practices.
• Solid grasp of enterprise data management, optimisation and security at scale.
• Confidence influencing technical direction and engineering standards.
• Excellent stakeholder engagement across business and technical teams.

Required skills

• Data engineering
• Cloud data ingestion
• Data processing
• Data storage
• Data testing
• Data monitoring
• Version control