Principal Data Engineer

Who we are

CreateFuture is fast becoming the UK’s most recognisable digital consultancy, with years of experience building digital products and services for major organisations whilst putting our people first. We have offices in the centre of Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, and London as well as remote employees located throughout the country. 

We are a team of creators - whether that’s code, project plans, go to market strategies, culture initiatives, marketing campaigns, large language models or people policies. And together, with our clients, we create the future. This has seen us collaborate and partner across a multitude of industries and sectors, with the likes of PayPal, adidas, Natwest, FanDuel and Money Saving Expert, to name just a few.

Our reputation as a partner determined to deliver high-quality, robust and thoughtful products has enabled us to scale to over 500 people in the last couple of years, and it is our amazing people - along with the safe, supportive and friendly culture we have built - that makes CreateFuture a great place to work. Don’t just take our word for it though, we have been recognised by Best Workplaces UK multiple years in a row - across a number of categories - and our employee exit rate is astonishingly low. 

Join us on our journey… Let’s create something awesome, together, today.

About the role and team:

About the role and team

We're looking for a Principal Data Engineer to join our Data Practice and own the technical direction of our iGaming data engineering capability. You'll work with some of the world's largest betting and gaming operators — organisations processing hundreds of millions of events per day across sportsbook, casino, exchange, and lottery platforms.

A Principal at Create Future operates above the delivery line as well as within it. You'll define how we solve the hardest data engineering problems in iGaming: petabyte-scale migrations from legacy on-premises estates, sub-millisecond event pipelines, settlement reconciliation at bookmaker scale, and the data foundations that keep operators compliant with gambling regulators globally.

You'll influence the shape of engagements from pre-sales through to delivery, grow the engineering talent around you, and be a recognisable voice for Create Future in the iGaming market.

What you'll be doing

Technical leadership

• Defining and owning the data engineering architecture patterns Create Future uses across iGaming engagements — migration frameworks, streaming architectures, data integrity standards, and Lakehouse design
• Acting as the most senior technical authority on client engagements — making critical architecture decisions, resolving design disputes, and setting the bar for quality
• Reviewing and signing off technical designs produced by Lead and Senior engineers across active engagements
• Identifying and driving the adoption of new tooling, patterns, and AWS services that improve delivery outcomes across the iGaming practice

Delivery

• Leading the technical design and execution of large-scale data migrations — moving high-volume transactional and event data from on-premises or legacy cloud estates to AWS, without loss of fidelity or operational continuity
• Architecting real-time and near-real-time data pipelines for sportsbook and in-play use cases — odds feeds, market events, bet placement streams, and settlement pipelines — where latency and correctness are non-negotiable
• Designing and enforcing data integrity frameworks across betting, trading, and customer data domains — including reconciliation between source and target systems, anomaly detection, and audit trail requirements
• Overseeing the implementation of regulatory and compliance reporting pipelines that meet the requirements of the UK Gambling Commission and international licensing bodies
• Working with AWS services including S3, Glue, Lambda, Athena, Redshift, RDS, Kinesis, MSK, Lake Formation, Step Functions, and MWAA — selecting the right tool for each problem rather than defaulting to a stack

Practice and people

• Mentoring and growing Lead and Senior Data Engineers — through code review, pairing, architecture sessions, and career conversations
• Building the iGaming data engineering playbook: reusable patterns, accelerators, and reference architectures that reduce time-to-value on new engagements
• Contributing to hiring — defining what great looks like for data engineering roles and playing an active part in assessment
• Representing Create Future externally — at industry events, in technical blog posts, and in client-facing settings — as a credible voice on iGaming data engineering

Commercial

• Shaping and leading technical responses to iGaming opportunities — scoping complex engagements, writing architecture proposals, and presenting to senior client stakeholders
• Identifying expansion opportunities within existing client relationships — spotting data engineering problems we can help solve and framing them as propositions
• Partnering with AWS on joint go-to-market activity where relevant, leveraging Create Future's Advanced Partner status

What we're looking for

Deep iGaming domain expertise

• Extensive experience working in or closely with sportsbook, exchange, or casino platforms — you understand the data models, operational pressures, and regulatory constraints from the inside
• You've led or made decisive contributions to large-scale data migrations in iGaming — moving live betting, customer, or trading data at scale while maintaining integrity and uptime
• You've designed or owned low-latency data pipelines where correctness and throughput are both critical — odds ingestion, in-play event streams, bet settlement, or equivalent
• You understand what data integrity means in a regulated gambling context: reconciliation, audit trails, lineage, and the consequences of getting it wrong

AWS data engineering mastery

• AWS is your primary cloud and you can design across the full data engineering stack — from ingestion and streaming through to warehousing, serving, and cost optimisation
• You have deep experience with streaming architectures — Kinesis, Kafka/MSK, Flink, or Spark Streaming — and know when each is the right choice
• You can model the cost implications of architecture decisions and advise clients on trade-offs between throughput, latency, durability, and spend
• AWS certification at professional or specialty level is strongly preferred

Engineering excellence

• Mastery of Python, SQL, and Spark — and strong opinions on how they should be used in production data pipelines
• Deep experience with dbt, Airflow, or equivalent orchestration — including how to build pipelines that are testable, observable, and operationally sound
• Strong understanding of data quality engineering — not just validation rules, but how to build systems that detect and surface integrity issues before they reach consumers
• Comfortable with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, AWS CDK) and treating data platform infrastructure as a first-class engineering concern

Consultancy and leadership

• You've operated at Principal or equivalent level — making architectural decisions that affect multiple teams, and being accountable for their outcomes
• You're comfortable in C-suite and VP-level client conversations, translating technical complexity into business risk and opportunity
• You can hold a room on a difficult technical topic and reach a decision — not just present options
• You've grown engineering talent around you and take it seriously as a leadership responsibility

Tech snapshot

Primary cloud	AWS — Glue, Lambda, Athena, S3, Redshift, RDS, Kinesis, MSK, Lake Formation, Step Functions, MWAA
Streaming	AWS Kinesis, Apache Kafka / MSK, Apache Flink, Spark Streaming
Languages	Python, SQL, Spark
Pipeline tools	dbt, Airflow / AWS MWAA, AWS Glue
Platforms	Databricks, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift
Data quality	Great Expectations, dbt tests, reconciliation frameworks, data observability tooling
IaC / DevOps	Terraform, AWS CDK
Certification	AWS Professional or Specialty level strongly preferred