Principal Data Engineer
Department: Intel
Employment Type: Permanent
Location: Sofia
Reporting To: Tribe Lead
Description
As Principal Data Engineer, you will tackle the hardest data engineering challenges, shape technical direction, and help raise the bar for reliability, scalability, and engineering quality across our data estate.
This role combines deep technical delivery with cross-squad influence. You will work directly on complex platform and pipeline problems while mentoring others, improving engineering standards, and helping teams deliver robust, production-ready data solutions.
You will work across both our legacy Pentaho ETL estate and our modern Databricks lakehouse platform, leading complex implementations, improving large-scale workload performance, and helping define the engineering patterns that make delivery safer, faster, and more scalable.
This role is ideal for someone who enjoys staying close to the code, solving difficult production problems, and helping other engineers succeed, while making a visible impact across both platform evolution and day-to-day delivery.
What you'll be doing
You’ll lead complex engineering work across critical data pipelines and platform capabilities, acting as the technical quality bar for data engineering across the Tribe.
This will include:
- Leading and implementing complex engineering work across critical data pipelines and platform capabilities.
- Taking the lead on difficult production incidents, performance bottlenecks, and data integrity issues.
- Driving root-cause analysis and remediation for systemic engineering and operational weaknesses.
- Designing, building, optimising, and troubleshooting scalable data pipelines across batch and streaming workloads where applicable.
- Contributing production-grade Python and SQL code aligned to engineering standards for maintainability, readability, observability, and operational resilience.
- Leading optimisation and stabilisation efforts across Pentaho ETL and Databricks lakehouse ecosystems.
- Improving Spark workload efficiency, cluster utilisation, query performance, storage optimisation, orchestration reliability, and platform scalability.
- Defining and implementing observability standards for critical pipelines and datasets.
- Improving operational readiness across the data estate through monitoring, alerting, dashboards, runbooks, ownership clarity, and operational tooling.
- Improving developer experience through reusable frameworks, CI/CD patterns, templates, libraries, and “golden path” implementation examples.
- Promoting pragmatic and safe adoption of AI-assisted and agentic engineering approaches where they improve engineering outcomes.
- Supporting data-heavy and AI-enabled product initiatives including recommendation engines, behavioural scoring, propensity modelling, and intelligent automation features.
- Designing and building production services, APIs, and integration layers that expose new data capabilities and features into products and operational workflows.
- Developing squad engineering leads through mentorship, coaching, technical guidance, and hands-on support.
- Collaborating with Data Engineers, Platform Engineering, SRE, Architecture, Governance, Product teams and engineering leadership to unblock delivery and support complex engineering challenges.
What we are looking for
- Strong hands-on experience designing, building, operating, and optimising enterprise-scale data platforms and pipelines.
- Experience with Pentaho ETL or similar technologies in large-scale production environments.
- Strong hands-on experience with Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, and modern lakehouse engineering patterns.
- Advanced Python and SQL skills, supported by solid software engineering fundamentals including testing, CI/CD, observability, packaging, and code quality.
- Experience designing and building production services, APIs, and integration layers that bring data capabilities into products and business workflows.
- A strong understanding of distributed data processing, scalability, resilience, and failure handling.
- Experience diagnosing and resolving complex production issues, including performance, instability, and data integrity problems.
- Good knowledge of modern data engineering patterns including CDC, idempotency, streaming concepts, backfills, partitioning, and workload optimisation.
- Experience operating production-grade data services with strong observability and operational excellence practices.
- The ability to influence engineering direction and raise capability across multiple squads through technical credibility and collaboration.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers or technical leads in a complex engineering environment.
- Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical topics clearly to a range of audiences.
It would also be great if you have:
- Experience operating hybrid legacy and modern data platform estates.
- Experience with cloud-based data ecosystems, Azure preferred.
- Experience supporting data and AI product development initiatives.
- Exposure to recommendation systems, behavioural analytics, propensity modelling, or intelligent automation platforms.
- Practical experience applying AI-assisted or agentic tooling within engineering workflows.
- Experience operating within highly regulated, high-availability, or operationally sensitive environments.
What we can offer you
Here at Bede, we offer a competitive salary and a strong benefits package, but what really matters to us is creating an environment where people feel trusted, supported and able to do their best work. We’re a people-centric business and we regularly review our benefits based on colleague feedback, so what we offer continues to reflect what matters most to our
teams.
Some of the benefits you can expect include:
- A friendly, flexible and trust-based approach to working
- 25 days annual leave, plus usually a generous Christmas break
- Premium private healthcare and dental care with Uniqa, available from day one
- Flexi-Funds – a monthly allowance of 65 EUR to support bills and essential expenses in a way that works for you
- Food vouchers – 60 EUR per month
- Innovation and learning – space to develop skills, try new ideas and experiment, with an annual hackathon where some ideas make it into real work
- A great office setup – free snacks and drinks every day
- Access to the Storytel app for audiobooks and e-books
- Bede Bucks – exclusive colleague discounts and access to a wellbeing platform
- Lots of social events – both in and outside of working hours
- Referral programme – help us grow the team and receive a referral bonus of up to 3,000 EUR (pre-tax, subject to scheme terms)
- Bede swag – including hoodies, t-shirts and our much-loved Bede socks
- Bede Holidays – extra discretionary days off through the year as a thank-you for the great work our teams do
