Overview

Principal Data Engineer role at IDBS.

IDBS helps BioPharma organizations unlock the potential of AI/ML to improve the lives of patients. As a trusted long-term partner to 80% of the top 20 global BioPharma companies, IDBS delivers powerful cloud software and services specifically designed to meet the evolving needs of the BioPharma sector.

IDBS, a Danaher company, leverages 35 years of scientific informatics expertise to help organizations design, execute and orchestrate processes, manage, contextualize and structure data and gain valuable insights throughout the product lifecycle, from R&D through manufacturing. Known for its signature IDBS E-WorkBook software, IDBS has extended its flexible, scalable solutions to the IDBS Polar and PIMS cloud platforms to help scientists make smarter decisions with assured confidence in both GxP and non-GxP environments.

Role purpose: We are seeking a Principal Data Engineer who will be a vital cog in our team, designing and developing IDBS’s data-driven products. You will deliver data-rich software and contribute to the architectural design, technical approach and implementation mechanisms adopted by the team. You will be directly involved in the development of data-centric products from ingest to egress via pipelines, data warehousing, cataloguing, integrations and other mechanisms.

The role spans the software delivery lifecycle including creation and elaboration of business requirements, functional and technical design specifications, development and maintenance of our software (including prototyping) and driving innovation into our product suite. You will ensure the development and maintenance of IDBS’s software platforms adheres to IDBS’s architecture vision.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable data pipelines using Databricks and Apache Spark (PySpark) to support analytics and other data-driven initiatives.
• Support the elaboration of requirements, formulation of the technical implementation plan and backlog refinement. Provide technical perspective to product enhancements and new requirements activities.
• Optimize Spark-based workflows for performance, scalability, and data integrity, ensuring alignment with GxP and other regulatory standards.
• Research and promote new technologies, design patterns, approaches, tools and methodologies that could optimise and accelerate development.
• Apply strong software engineering practices including version control (Git), CI/CD pipelines, unit testing, and code reviews to ensure maintainable and production-grade code.

Success metrics

• Delivered reliable, scalable data pipelines that process clinical and pharmaceutical data efficiently, reducing data latency and improving time-to-insight for research and regulatory teams.
• Enabled regulatory compliance by implementing secure, auditable, and GxP-aligned data workflows with robust access controls.
• Improved system performance and cost-efficiency by optimizing Spark jobs and Databricks clusters, leading to measurable reductions in compute costs and processing times.
• Fostered cross-functional collaboration by building reusable, testable, well-documented Databricks notebooks and APIs that empower data scientists, analysts, and other stakeholders to build out our product suite.
• Contributed to a culture of engineering excellence through code reviews, CI/CD automation, and mentoring, resulting in higher code quality, faster deployments, and increased team productivity.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience deploying Databricks functionality in a SaaS environment (infrastructure as code) with experience of Spark, Python and a breadth of database technologies.
• Experience with event-driven and distributed systems using messaging systems like Kafka, AWS SNS/SQS and languages such as Java and Python.
• Data-centric architectures, including experience with Data Governance/Management practices and Data Lakehouse/Data Intelligence platforms. Experience of AI software delivery and AI data preparation would be an advantage.

At IDBS we believe in designing a better, more sustainable workforce. This position is eligible for a flexible work arrangement with part-time work at the Company location and part-time remote work. Additional information will be provided by the interview team.