Principal Data Engineer

About us

At Auctane, we are united by a passion to help sellers — wherever they are, however they operate — fulfil the promises they make to consumers. The Auctane mission is to fuel commerce through exceptional delivery. We make it possible for businesses to meet the ever-rising expectations of their customers, and we make the world smaller and more accessible to consumers everywhere. Auctane brands enable hundreds of thousands of merchants to annually deliver billions of products — over $200 billion worth — to customers around the globe. And Auctane is just getting started.

Auctane is a team of shipping and software experts with a passion for helping merchants move their ideas, dreams and innovations around the globe. The Auctane family includes ShipStation, ShipWorks, ShipEngine, ShippingEasy, Stamps, Endicia, Metapack, Shipsi, GlobalPost, and Packlink. Our partners include Amazon, UPS, USPS, eBay, BigCommerce, Shopify, WooCommerce, and Walmart.

Our values

About the role

This is a hands-on role for a Principal Data Engineer seating within the Data Products team. In this role, you will have an enormous impact on the design, implementation and maintenance of existing and greenfield customer-facing data products. Data is key to Auctane’s strategy. We work at a scale pace and with the latest architecture patterns and tech. We process thousands of events per second and our massive dataset keeps growing at a staggering pace. We keep improving our data platform and data engineering stack to accommodate growth, enable novel solutions and provide the best service to our customers. We have a flat and open engineering culture where data & evidence beat opinion and hierarchy, backed by honest discussions. We passionately believe in forming autonomous, cross-functional teams who are empowered to deliver our ambitious strategy. Energy and passion for our business and customers are a part of the Auctane culture – and we love working with like-minded people.

What you’ll be doing?

• Contribute to the design, build and operational management of our data pipelines and analytics solution on top of proven AWS data technologies like S3, Athena, Lambda, Kinesis and ECS.
• Motivate and grow the team to develop their skills and increase their ownership and impact
• Collaborate with the Product Owner and other stakeholders to implement the Data Products strategy.
• Develop frameworks and solutions that enable us to acquire, process, monitor and extract value from our massive dataset.
• Drive the design and architecture of Auctane’s data product.
• Contribute directly to the implementation and operations of our systems.
• Support the Data Analysts and Data Scientists with automation, tooling, data pipelines and data engineering expertise, enabling them to build rich and complex analytical features and machine learning solutions for our data products.
• Be an advocate of data quality and observability principles and use state-of-the-art technologies like Airflow, dbt and Spark to process data and get our datasets just right.
• Define the roadmap of the team based on the input from the Product Owner, other leads and stakeholders.
• Foster engineering excellence by delivering highly reliable software and data pipelines using Software Engineering best practices like automation, version control, continuous integration/continuous delivery, testing, security, etc.
• Define, implement and enforce automated data security and data governance best practices within the solutions designed.
• Mentor more junior colleagues and coach the team on coding and data engineering best practices and patterns.

What are we looking for?

• A strong Data Engineering background.
• Experience developing and supporting robust, automated and reliable data pipelines in Python and SQL.
• Experience with data processing frameworks like Athena (Trino), Spark and tools like Pandas or DBT.
• Experience with cloud computing platforms (AWS, Azure or Google Cloud).
• Experience with streaming data processing.
• Continuous integration/delivery environment experience with a passion for automation.
• Knowledge of a Data Orchestration solution like Airflow, Oozie, Luigi or Prefect.
• Knowledge of both relational and non-relational database design.
• Knowledge of how to design distributed systems and the trade-offs involved 
• Experience working with software engineering best practices for development, including source control systems, automated deployment pipelines like Jenkins and DevOps tools like Terraform.
• Comfortable working within a geographically distributed team

What will make you stand out?

• Production experience working with very large datasets.
• Experience with AWS and big data cloud technologies like EMR, Athena (Trino), Glue, Big Query, Dataproc, Dataflow.
• Direct experience with Infrastructure as Code tools (e.g. Terraform, CloudFormation)
• Knowledge and direct experience of using business intelligence and analytics tools (Tableau, Looker, Power BI, etc.) 
• Practical understanding of PII related issues and other considerations regarding data security MLOps know-how.
• A desire to constantly challenge the norm Proven track record of promoting and maintaining high engineering standards.
• Fast learner with a keen interest in evaluating and adopting new technologies: Apache Iceberg, Dagster, DBT, GreatExpectations, Prefect, Snowflake, etc. 
• Willing to attend conferences, webinars and meet-ups and share the learning

What do we offer?

• 💷 Clear compensation. The salary range for this position is up to £ 97,000 per year. We’ll ask you about your salary expectations in the first interview to ensure we’re on the same page.
• 💻 Tools for the job: Auctane will provide you with all equipment you need, ensuring you can seamlessly and securely work from either the London office or the comfort of your home.
• 🏠 Flexible hybrid working approach: Hybrid working offers the flexibility to balance on-site collaboration and remote productivity, leading to enhanced efficiency and well-being. As part of our approach, we ask that you attend the office two days a week, ensuring a blend of in-person connection and remote work benefits.
• 🏢 Central London location: Experience the best of both worlds and join us at our fantastic office. Immerse yourself in our dynamic and open culture. Enjoy the array of complimentary drinks and snacks, and join our monthly social activities. Our London office serves as a vibrant hub within our global community, embodying true international diversity with representatives from over 20 different nationalities, speaking 10 languages. 
• 🌇 25 days holiday (plus public holidays). Your holiday entitlement will increase to max. of 30 days, based on your length of service (2 yrs / 27 days, 3yrs / 28 days, 4yrs / 29 days and 5 yrs / 30 days)
• 📈 Company Pension: Auctane operates a contributory pension scheme on behalf of its employees, and will contribute up to 4%, providing the employee matches the contribution.
• ❤️‍🩹 Life insurance: Auctane will provide 4x of base salary. This benefit is available from the first day of employment. 
• 💰 Long term income protection: 50% of your base salary for up to 5 years. This benefit is available from the first day of employment. 
• 🏥 Private Medical and Dental Insurance: Both benefits are via our partner Bupa and available post probation. (Dental enrolment only occurs in May)
• 📚 Personal Training Budget. We offer a generous training budget of up to £2000 per year dedicated to your professional development. Whether it’s investing in certifications, attending conferences, or exploring other educational opportunities, we are committed to supporting you in enhancing your expertise. We also provide access to LinkedIn Learning. This benefit is available post-probation. 
• 🏐 Health and Wellbeing: We have a wealth of health and wellbeing benefits available. Here’s just some of what we offer; gym membership and subsidies, 24/7 EAP, virtual GP appointments, subsidised eye care, counselling sessions, physiotherapy sessions, PT, and nutrition advice, financial and legal support. There is also an extensive resource library of podcasts, webinars and articles.
• 🚼 Tax-Free Childcare: You may be eligible for tax-free childcare, subject to the criteria set by the government. If successful, you can get up to £500 every 3 months (£2,000 a year) for each of your children to help with the costs of childcare.
• 🚲 Cycle to work scheme: Auctane offers a subsidised cycle purchase scheme, Through this scheme, you will enjoy exclusive benefits, including attractive savings and convenient payment plans. This benefit is available post-probation. 
• Interest-free season ticket loan: Auctane can provide an interest-free loan of up to £7,000 to purchase an annual season ticket for travel requirements. This benefit is available post-probation. 
• 🔗 Referral Bonus: Our Employee Referral Bonus Program is designed to reward you for helping us build an even stronger and more talented team. You could earn up to £3,000, depending on the role and subject to the bonus program criteria. 
• 📦 Postal Services: Auctane offers 99% discount on personal shipments using Packlink.pro