Principal Engineer (Data)

Principal Engineer (Data)

University of Bath - Digital, Data & Technology Group

AWS-focused Principal Data Engineer to lead the development and implementation of our University Data Hub. This role offers a unique opportunity to drive data engineering innovation in higher education.

What is our University Data Hub?

The University is undertaking a strategic project to improve its Data & Insights capability enabling the right people to get access to information and insight at the right time, with the right quality. We are currently building a brand-new University Data Hub in the AWS cloud, completely replacing an old on-premises solution which will be retired. The production UDH will transform and integrate data from as many sources as required, including live operating data, key data snapshots, and external datasets. It will manage structured and unstructured datasets, perform analysis of incoming data quality to inform data governance work, act as a single source of the truth, and underpin all analytics activity. It will support reports and dashboards via the Data Marketplace, with advanced modelling and machine learning as internal capacity and capability allows.

What you will do

• Develop ETL pipelines using AWS Glue, Kinesis, and Step Functions
• Manage and optimise large-scale data lakes with S3, Athena, and Lake Formation
• Implement robust data quality processes using Glue Data Quality and machine learning models
• Design event-driven architectures with EventBridge and Lambda
• Ensure data security through Macie, KMS, and advanced encryption frameworks

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement a modern data infrastructure
• Develop and scale governed comprehensive self-service data platform serving over 3,500 staff
• Create real-time analytics solutions for university-wide operational insights
• Design and build scalable machine learning operations pipelines for predictive analytics

Professional Growth Opportunities

• Spearhead the adoption of DataOps and MLOps methodologies
• Explore applications of emerging technologies in data processing
• Engage with the open-source community in data engineering projects
• Provide mentorship and technical leadership to a team of data engineers

Experience of skills in the following tools/domains:

• Demonstrated expertise in building scalable, cloud-native data platforms on AWS, leveraging EC2, S3, RDS, VPC, Glue (Data Quality, Studio, DataBrew), Kinesis, Step Functions, EventBridge, SNS, CloudWatch, and Macie for secure, event-driven data solutions
• Experienced across core data domains, including: Data Engineering: ETL design, data cleansing, and batch/streaming pipelines; Data Platforms: Data lakes, warehouses, and metadata management; Analytics: OLAP, reporting, and visualisation (Power BI etc); Databases: Oracle, SQL Server etc
• Strong focus on delivering scalable, governed, and insight-ready data solutions

This role is offered on a full time (36.5 hours per week) permanent basis.

There is a market supplement of up to £5,800 available at our discretion, based on skills and experience.