Principal Data Engineer

Bede Gaming

Principal Data Engineer tackling data engineering challenges, shaping technical direction at Bede Gaming. Mentoring others and improving engineering quality across the data estate.

Posted 6/15/2026full-timeSofia • 🇧🇬 BulgariaLeadWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

AzureCloudETLPythonSparkSQL

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

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.

Requirements

What you’ll need

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.

Benefits

Comp & perks

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

ATS Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

PythonSQLPentaho ETLDatabricksSparkDelta LakeCI/CDobservabilitydata pipelinesAPIs

Soft Skills

communicationmentorshipcollaborationinfluencetechnical guidanceproblem-solvingcoachingleadershipclaritysupport