Principal Data Engineer

Description

IG Group is a FTSE 100 fintech operating across five continents, serving over 1.3m customers and handling billions of dollars in transactions – built on scale, trust, and proof. We didn’t pivot to innovation; it’s how we’ve always operated. What that means for the people who work here is real: genuinely complex problems to solve, the technology and resources to tackle them properly, and the kind of scope that’s rare in established businesses. The bar is high – bring a curious and forward-thinking mindset and we’ll give you the platform to define what comes next. Join us at IG – the future gets built here.

How we work

• Lead and Inspire: Drives trust, alignment, and enthusiasm

• Think Big: Focus on the problems that most impact commercial outcomes

• Champion the client: Understand and prioritise client’s needs

• Deliver at pace: Push for fast, sustainable growth

• Raise the bar: Take ownership, be accountable and share feedback

What you’ll do

• Own the technical architecture of IG’s GCP data platform end-to-end — Core Lake (BigQuery), batch and real-time (Kafka) ingestion, transformation in the Medallion architecture, and Data-Engineering-owned integration services — setting the reference designs and patterns squads build against.

• Lead delivery of the most complex, high-risk work within the GCP consolidation programme, including migration off the legacy AWS platform and on-premises systems onto GCP-native capabilities.

• Define the platform contracts, interfaces, and self-service patterns that let mature divisions build and own their own models safely against trusted Core Lake data, and ensure fully-managed builds for less-mature functions follow the identical pattern so they are handover-ready by design.

• Drive data quality as a first-class, firm-wide concern: establish data contracts, observability, SLA/SLO monitoring, and automated alerting and remediation across ingestion and transformation layers, and hold squads to those standards.

• Act as the senior technical point of contact for stakeholders across Compliance, Marketing, Finance, Data Science, and the self-serving divisions (UK, APAC, tastytrade/US, Quants, Risk), translating requirements into well-scoped, well-architected engineering deliverables.

• Set and uphold engineering standards through code and design reviews, technical mentoring, and reusable frameworks that raise the bar across squads in London, India, and Poland — growing the technical capability of the whole function.

• Provide technical direction and quality assurance for third-party staff augmentation, ensuring augmented capacity engaged for time-boxed projects works to IG’s patterns and leaves behind maintainable, standards-compliant assets.

• Maintain delivery rigour: shape sprint cadences, escalate technical risk early, and report on pipeline SLOs, data freshness, and DORA-style engineering metrics to the Head of Data Engineering and CDO.

What you’ll need for this role

• Hands-on experience designing and operating large-scale data pipelines on GCP (BigQuery, Cloud Composer/Airflow, GCS), with proven knowledge of Apache Kafka and real-time streaming architectures

• Demonstrated experience leading or technically mentoring a team of data engineers, with the ability to set standards, conduct code and design reviews, and grow engineers’ capabilities

• Strong grasp of data quality practices: data contracts, pipeline observability, SLA/SLO definition, and automated alerting and remediation

• Solid understanding of SQL transformation patterns and modern tooling such as dbt, alongside experience managing ingestion estates with third-party connectors and in-house integrations

• Clear and confident communicator able to work cross-functionally with non-technical stakeholders; comfortable in a regulated financial services environment with structured delivery disciplines (sprint cadences, change control, escalation)