Arbor Education · 1 month ago
Principal Data Engineer
United States
Full-time
Remote
Lead/Staff
£100K/yr - £120K/yrArbor Education is dedicated to transforming the educational landscape by providing innovative management tools for schools. As a Principal Data Engineer, you will drive the architecture and technical strategy for data, ensuring efficient data flow from transactional systems to analytical insights while collaborating with various teams to achieve strategic business objectives.
Big DataEducationSaaS
No H1B
Responsibilities
Define and evangelise target architectures that bridge our transactional, analytical, and AI systems, ensuring our data remains a competitive advantage
Be a leader for our end-to-end data lifecycle, from OLTP schema design and migrations to OLAP governance, platform and analytics
Partner with Technical Leads to provide hands-on guidance supporting feature delivery, tech debt paydown, and architecture improvements. (Hands-on for this role means staying close to the details but not necessarily coding)
Collaborate with Product Directors to understand product vision and translate this into deliverables, aligning commercial and engineering goals
Lead our shift to an AI-First way of working, architecting the data foundations to enable AI in our products and championing the latest approaches to help drive productivity gains
Architect the future infrastructure required for LLM orchestration, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and real-time model inference at scale
Mentor and coach Technical Leads/Senior Engineers on architectural and engineering excellence, continually raising our bar and supporting career growth
Act as a role model for technical leadership — work with pace, be pragmatic, and stay laser focused on outcomes not output
Head up architectural reviews for your domain and ensure all designs meet Arbor’s quality, reliability, security and compliance standards
Collaborate with Staff Engineers and Principal Engineers to shape Arbor’s broader technology strategy, working outside your domain as needed
Partner with Engineering Management to help grow teams, identify and resolve systemic bottlenecks, ensuring the success of our strategic goals
Qualification
Required
Extensive experience overseeing data architecture and a track record of delivering iterative outcomes across one or more OLAP domains
Strong understanding of data modelling techniques (Star, Medallion, etc) and distributed data systems within cloud-native environments (Snowflake, etc)
Experience in building and leveraging unstructured data across disparate systems to enable product development
Examples of communication and influencing across technical and non-technical audiences to achieve positive outcomes
An ability to support the growth of engineers and technical leads whilst still delivering value across distributed, cross-functional teams
Demonstrable experience working in an ownership culture where quality, performance, observability, and security are core responsibilities for every engineer
An understanding and opinion on how AI-first engineering will change the data ecosystem and ways of working, ideally with worked examples
Examples of contributing to or leading technical communities of practice (e.g. chapters, guilds, architecture councils)
Practical knowledge of DataOps principles, including CI/CD for data and the orchestration of complex pipelines (e.g., AWS, Debezium, Git, Infra as Code)
Good commercial knowledge of data security standards, encryption at rest/transit, and relevant compliance laws
Platform financial acumen - demonstrable experience of optimising SaaS platform spend, and the use of forecasting models
Preferred
AI/ML Engineering & MLOps, including model deployment/serving and monitoring
Experience with federated learning and/or privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs)
Direct experience with LLM Ops, including prompt engineering at scale, and token cost optimisation
Benefits
A dedicated wellbeing team who champion initiatives such as mindfulness, lunch n learns, manager training, mental health first aid training and much more!
32 days holiday (plus Bank Holidays). This is made up of 25 days annual leave plus 7 extra company wide days given over Easter, Summer & Christmas
Life Assurance paid out at 3x annual salary
Comprehensive wellness benefit provided by AIG Smart Health, which provides a 24/7 virtual GP service, Mental health support, Counselling, and personalised Health Checks
Private Dental Insurance with Bupa
Salary sacrifice Pension provided by Scottish Widows
Enhanced maternity and adoption leave (20 weeks full pay) and paternity (6 weeks full pay) pay
5 free return to work maternity coaching sessions, helping you adapt to this new exciting time of life!
Access to services such as Calm and Bippit (financial wellbeing coaching)
All of our roles champion flexible working and we are happy to discuss what this means to you
Social committees that plan team, office and company wide events to bring people together and celebrate success
Dedicated professional development training budget (CPD courses, upskilling resources, professional memberships etc)
Volunteer with a charity of your choice for a day each year
Dog friendly offices!
Company
Arbor Education
Arbor helps schools transform the way they work
Founded in 2011
201-500 employees
Funding
Current Stage
Growth StageTotal Funding
$14.22MKey Investors
CBPE Capital
2020-12-09Private Equity
2020-04-04Series Unknown· $3.68M
2018-12-03Series Unknown· $2.26M
Leadership Team
James Weatherill
Co-founder & CEO
Company data provided by crunchbase