Principal Data Engineer

Principal Software Engineer

At Arbor, we're on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better. We believe in a future of work in schools where being challenged doesn't mean being burnt out and overworked. Where data guides progress without overwhelming staff. And where everyone working in a school is reminded why they got into education every day. Our MIS and school management tools are already making a difference in over 12,000 schools and trusts. Giving time and power back to staff, turning data into clear, actionable insights, and supporting happier working days. At the heart of our brand is a recognition that the challenges schools face today aren't just about efficiency, outputs and productivity - but about creating happier working lives for the people who drive education everyday: the staff. We want to make schools more joyful places to work, as well as learn.

As a Principal Software Engineer you will help drive architecture and technical strategy for our Data domain, spanning the entire journey from transactional source to analytical insight. You will evolve how data is leveraged across Arbor, delivering value that ensures our OLAP and AI capabilities provide a competitive edge and our OLTP foundations are built for scale.

It's a wide impacting and exciting role, crucial for Arbor's next stage of growth. We're looking for candidates who are highly collaborative, energised by complex problems, and have a proactive approach. You will work collaboratively with multiple teams, Technical Leads, Product Directors, and Engineering Leadership to deliver strategic business objectives, all while reimagining ways of working to ensure we stay at the forefront of the industry's AI evolution.

Core responsibilities

• Define and evangelise target architectures that bridge our transactional, analytical, and AI systems, ensuring our data remains a competitive advantage.
• Be a leader for our end-to-end data lifecycle, from OLTP schema design and migrations to OLAP governance, platform and analytics.
• Partner with Technical Leads to provide hands-on guidance supporting feature delivery, tech debt paydown, and architecture improvements. (Hands-on for this role means staying close to the details but not necessarily coding)
• Collaborate with Product Directors to understand product vision and translate this into deliverables, aligning commercial and engineering goals.
• Lead our shift to an AI-First way of working, architecting the data foundations to enable AI in our products and championing the latest approaches to help drive productivity gains
• Architect the future infrastructure required for LLM orchestration, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and real-time model inference at scale
• Mentor and coach Technical Leads/Senior Engineers on architectural and engineering excellence, continually raising our bar and supporting career growth
• Act as a role model for technical leadership — work with pace, be pragmatic, and stay laser focused on outcomes not output
• Head up architectural reviews for your domain and ensure all designs meet Arbor's quality, reliability, security and compliance standards.
• Collaborate with Staff Engineers and Principal Engineers to shape Arbor's broader technology strategy, working outside your domain as needed
• Partner with Engineering Management to help grow teams, identify and resolve systemic bottlenecks, ensuring the success of our strategic goals

Requirements

• Extensive experience overseeing data architecture and a track record of delivering iterative outcomes across one or more OLAP domains
• Strong understanding of data modelling techniques (Star, Medallion, etc) and distributed data systems within cloud-native environments (Snowflake, etc).
• Experience in building and leveraging unstructured data across disparate systems to enable product development.
• Examples of communication and influencing across technical and non-technical audiences to achieve positive outcomes.
• An ability to support the growth of engineers and technical leads whilst still delivering value across distributed, cross-functional teams.
• Demonstrable experience working in an ownership culture where quality, performance, observability, and security are core responsibilities for every engineer
• An understanding and opinion on how AI-first engineering will change the data ecosystem and ways of working, ideally with worked examples
• Examples of contributing to or leading technical communities of practice (e.g. chapters, guilds, architecture councils).
• Practical knowledge of DataOps principles, including CI/CD for data and the orchestration of complex pipelines (e.g., AWS, Debezium, Git, Infra as Code).
• Good commercial knowledge of data security standards, encryption at rest/transit, and relevant compliance laws.
• Platform financial acumen - demonstrable experience of optimising SaaS platform spend, and the use of forecasting models.

Bonus Skills

• AI/ML Engineering & MLOps, including model deployment/serving and monitoring.
• Experience with federated learning and/or privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs).
• Direct experience with LLM Ops, including prompt engineering at scale, and token cost optimisation.

Benefits

What we offer

• A dedicated wellbeing team who champion initiatives such as mindfulness, lunch n learns, manager training, mental health first aid training and much more!
• 32 days holiday (plus Bank Holidays). This is made up of 25 days annual leave plus 7 extra company wide days given over Easter, Summer & Christmas
• Life Assurance paid out at 3x annual salary
• Comprehensive wellness benefit provided by AIG Smart Health, which provides a 24/7 virtual GP service, Mental health support, Counselling, and personalised Health Checks
• Private Dental Insurance with Bupa
• Salary sacrifice Pension provided by Scottish Widows
• Enhanced maternity and adoption leave (20 weeks full pay) and paternity (6 weeks full pay) pay
• 5 free return to work maternity coaching sessions, helping you adapt to this new exciting time of life!
• Access to services such as Calm and Bippit (financial wellbeing coaching)
• All of our roles champion flexible working and we are happy to discuss what this means to you
• Social committees that plan team, office and company wide events to bring people together and celebrate success
• Dedicated professional development training budget (CPD courses, upskilling resources, professional memberships etc)
• Volunteer with a charity of your choice for a day each year
• Dog friendly offices!

1. Phone screen
2. 1st stage
3. 2nd stage

We are committed to a fair and comfortable recruitment process, so if you require any reasonable adjustments during your application or interview process, please reach out to a member of the team at View email address on click.appcast.io.

Our commitment is also backed by our partnership with Neurodiversity Consultancy, Lexxic who provide us with training, support and advice.

Arbor Education is an equal opportunities organisation

Our goal is for Arbor to be a workplace which represents, celebrates and supports people from all backgrounds, and which gives them the tools they need to thrive - whatever their ambitions may be so we support and promote diversity and equality, and actively encourage applications from people of all backgrounds.

Refer a friend

Know someone else who would be good for this role? You can refer a friend, family member or colleague, if they are offered a role with Arbor, we will say thank you with a voucher valued up to £200! Simply email: View email address on click.appcast.io

Please note: We are unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time.