Overview

We're looking for a Principal Data Engineer to play a leading role in shaping and implementing our enterprise data architecture. This position is ideal for someone who combines deep technical expertise with strong stakeholder engagement skills and a strategic mindset. You'll help define and implement the data foundations that enable impactful AI and analytics solutions across our global engineering, consulting, and infrastructure business. You\'ll work closely with cross-disciplinary teams, including data scientists, domain experts, and product managers, to design scalable, secure, and interoperable data systems. You\'ll also help establish our enterprise data ontology and lead a small team of data engineers to turn that vision into reality.

What You\'ll Do

• Enterprise data pipeline design & optimisation: Design and implement robust data pipelines to map both structured and unstructured data from diverse sources into the enterprise vector store, ensuring high-quality embeddings for downstream retrieval and analysis.
• Ontology and data modelling: Lead the development of semantic data models and domain ontologies to enable data interoperability and traceability across the enterprise.
• Team leadership: Provide technical direction and mentoring for a small team of data engineers, supporting their growth while maintaining delivery velocity.
• Hands-On engineering: Build, evolve, and maintain scalable, secure data pipelines, APIs, and infrastructure in a modern cloud environment (Azure preferred).
• Stakeholder collaboration: Partner with technical and non-technical stakeholders across business units to gather requirements, align roadmaps, and communicate architecture decisions effectively.
• Governance & best practices: Promote robust data management, including lineage, observability, access control, and compliance with ethical data use.
• Innovation & standards: Stay ahead of industry trends in data architecture, engineering, and metadata/semantic technologies—and bring them into practice where they add value.
• Enterprise data architecture: Collaborate with other architects to define and implement data architecture patterns across systems and domains to support analytical, AI, and operational use cases.

Qualifications & Experience

• Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills—able to bridge technical detail and strategic business value.
• Experience in data engineering and architecture, ideally in complex or regulated enterprise environments.
• Expertise in designing and implementing scalable data architectures using cloud platforms (Azure preferred).
• Strong experience with data modelling—from conceptual to logical and physical—and familiarity with data catalogues, knowledge graphs, or ontology tools.
• Proven experience managing or mentoring other data engineers.
• Solid programming skills in Python and SQL, and familiarity with tools such as Git, CI/CD workflows, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Experience with data pipeline orchestration tools (e.g., Dagster) and modern data stack components.

Additional Information

• We are actively recruiting a diverse workforce that is reflective of the communities we serve. We recognise that differences in ability, skills and experience are a strength and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds.
• UK Immigration: Mott MacDonald Ltd. are not currently offering sponsorship to candidates under the Skilled Worker visa route in the UK. We welcome applications from candidates eligible for alternative immigration routes.
• Agile working: Hybrid working policy that supports flexibility and well-being.
• Equality, diversity, and inclusion: We promote fair employment procedures and an inclusive environment where everyone can contribute.
• Accessibility: If you need support to apply or attend an interview, contact reasonable.adjustments@mottmac.com.

Benefits

• Health and wellbeing: Private medical insurance for all UK colleagues; health cash plan; access to Peppy for menopause support; comprehensive wellbeing program; salary flex for health benefits.
• Financial wellbeing: Pension contributions matched between 4.5% and 7%; life assurance up to 4x basic salary (option to 6x); income protection; flexible benefits and bonus schemes.
• Additional: Enhanced holiday entitlement; enhanced family and carers leave; learning and development opportunities; employee networks and social impact activities.