Principal Data Engineer (Contract) Hybrid (London-based) | £450–£650/day A leading scientific and cultural institution is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to design and scale cloud-native data infrastructure powering biodiversity research, digitisation, and AI workflows.

Key Responsibilities

Architect and build scalable data pipelines for ingestion, transformation, enrichment, and publication.

Integrate AI/ML workflows, including training data pipelines and inference outputs.

Lead AWS-based data engineering using services like S3, Lambda, Glue, and Athena.

Ensure interoperability with global research infrastructures (e.g. DiSSCo UK, RECODE, DToL).

Define best practices in data quality, metadata, and reproducibility.

Collaborate with cross-functional teams (science, software, product).

Mentor engineers and contribute to institutional data strategy and standards.

Tech Requirements

Strong Python skills; experience with Airflow, Luigi, or Spark.

Proven track record building robust, scalable ETL/ELT systems.

Experience with scientific, semi-structured, or biodiversity data.

Familiarity with semantic web standards (e.g. Darwin Core, JSON-LD, Linked Data).

Knowledge of NoSQL/graph databases (e.g. MongoDB, Neo4j, Neptune) a plus.

Hands-on with cloud-native architectures, especially AWS.

Understanding of data versioning, provenance, and governance.

Robert Walters Operations Limited is an employment business and employment agency and welcomes applications from all candidates