Principal Data EngineerLocation: RemoteSalary: Up to £95,000Sponsorship: Not available VIQU have partnered with a nationally recognised organisation that has recently completed a full migration from on-premise infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and is now building a modern, domain-oriented Data Mesh. This is a critical leadership hire as they continue to scale their cloud data platform and embed engineering excellence across multiple product domains.This is not a step-up role. They will only consider candidates with proven Principal or Lead-level experience, including clear ownership of engineers, standards, and cross-domain architectural direction. The Role As Principal Data Engineer, you will be the senior technical authority across data product squads, driving strategy, architecture, and engineering best practice.Key responsibilities include: Providing visible, hands-on technical leadership across multiple domain teams Defining how projects are approached and ensuring delivery standards are upheld Designing and governing scalable pipelines using BigQuery, Dataflow, Datastream, Data Fusion, Dataproc and Cloud Composer (Airflow) Leading best practice across dbt, Terraform, Docker and CI/CD Driving Data Mesh adoption, domain ownership, and interoperable data products Setting modelling standards across raw, curated and semantic layers Embedding governance covering lineage, MDM, data quality, PII and compliance Mentoring and challenging senior engineers to maintain