Data Solution Principal in Birmingham

About Us
We’re on a mission to close the world’s tech skills gap. We help organisations navigate the future of technology, combining human expertise, emerging tech and AI to deliver better outcomes, faster. Since 2014, we’ve worked side-by-side with clients to solve complex challenges, build high-performing teams, and create lasting capability. As technology continues to evolve, we believe the most successful organisations will be those that combine the best of both: human ingenuity AND intelligent technology. That belief is embedded in everything we do. We call it the genius of the AND: deep expertise AND practical delivery, innovation AND responsibility, ambitious work AND sustainable careers. Through our Guide, Build and Equip approach, we help organisations embrace change, deliver meaningful impact, and develop the skills they need to thrive in an increasingly agentic world.

About you:
You care deeply about producing high-quality work that delivers real value.
You’re comfortable navigating ambiguity and solving complex problems collaboratively.
You bring strong expertise in your craft, alongside a willingness to keep learning.
You communicate clearly and build trust quickly with clients and teammates.
You’re pragmatic, adaptable and outcome-focused.
You enjoy sharing knowledge and helping others grow.
You value low-ego collaboration and enjoy working as part of multidisciplinary teams.

To strengthen AND's position as a leader in the data industry, we are seeking a Data Solution Principal (hands-on Architect) to both lead and expand our data & AI capability. This pivotal position supporting the local club leadership requires a balance of leading on client, taking a leading role in the data practice proposition in the local market and building out our existing data skills and capability. You will be working closely with AND's global data practice team, your practice team and local leadership to drive growth and value for our clients deepening our client partnerships.

Your Leadership & Influence:

• Data Leadership: You have a proven track record of managing and inspiring teams. You excel at navigating the complexities of enterprise-scale problem solving, turning challenges into opportunities for our clients.
• Stakeholder Artistry: You are a master of client-facing delivery. You can translate complex data concepts into business value, managing multi-vendor environments with a focus on long-term partnership.
• Designing for People and Purpose: Your expertise goes beyond just building scalable architectures; you design systems with a focus on delivering value. You ensure that your extensible and scalable solutions are implemented because they consistently meet the evolving needs of both the business and its users.

Your strategic mindset:

• Quality Advocate: You take personal pride in the integrity of your work. Beyond just fixing bugs, you champion quality assurance and performance tuning as a mindset, ensuring the data programs we build for our clients are robust, reliable, and respected.
• Industry Stewardship: You are a lifelong learner who keeps a pulse on industry standards and best practices.
• Partnership Focus: You champion relationships with technology partners, whether established or new, working collaboratively to deliver for clients.

Your Technical Fluency:

• You lead by example. While your primary focus is strategic, you maintain the technical depth required to guide teams through the full Data Product Lifecycle:
• Technology breadth: You bring a seasoned perspective to both modern and traditional ecosystems—with extensive experience building production-ready data solutions using Databricks and an Agile mindset. Hands-on experience of Microsoft Azure/Fabric, Snowflake, AWS and/or GCP would be a bonus.
• Data Product mentality: You understand how to build Data Products ensuring that every pipeline and dataset is discoverable, addressable, and secure by design.
• Data capabilities: You understand the full lifecycle of data from data discovery, storage, pipelines, ETL, streaming through to how data is managed including data quality, metadata management and how data is used for applications and core decision making through advanced analytics.
• AI: You have a deep expertise or experience of AI, specifically how to build AI solutions in modern data platforms (Databricks/Snowflake), understanding different business challenges require varied solutions from SLM’s to intelligent Agentic automation from LLM foundational models, Human in the Loop and MLOps.
• Data Architecture Design: You understand and know when to use various data architecture design patterns for data & AI products e.g. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented-Generation).
• Hands-on mindset: You speak the language of data fluently, whether it's Python, R, or SQL and are ready to jump in to provide solutions where required.

Ideal Certifications:
Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate/Professional or Databricks GenAI Associate.

Interview Process
We are committed to making the recruitment process as smooth and as hassle-free as possible. This is the approach we take:
Initial screening call with recruitment (30 mins)
Short home-prep case study
In-person technical interview (1-1.5 hours)
Cultural interview (45 mins)

Why join AND Digital?
We’re building a culture where talented people can do meaningful work, continue growing, AND enjoy the journey along the way. Our model is designed to build belonging and connection: we’re organised into regional ‘Clubs’ of no more than 80 people, so you (and our clients) get the benefits of that small company feel while also being connected to a larger whole. Our Practice Areas act as a ‘second home’ for our ANDis - a place where you can innovate and learn with like-minded experts who care deeply about their craft, support each other generously, and believe the best ideas come from collaboration, not hierarchy. Our culture is rooted in our values of Wonder, Share and Delight, and shows up through five traits that we celebrate and nurture in all our ANDis: we value curiosity, ambition and a growth-mindset. We are deeply client-centric. Most important of all we are human - we create an inclusive environment where people feel trusted, supported and able to be themselves.

By joining AND, we’ll provide:
25 days bookable holiday + flexible Bank Holidays
Pension: 6% of salary paid by AND Digital with a further 2% paid by you (can be increased by choice).
Aviva healthcare cover (including pre-existing condition cover) for you.
Flexibenefit: £1000 assigned to you via our benefits portal to select or upgrade the benefits that suit you the most. Any unused allowance from the £1000 can be taken as cash.
Life Assurance.
Income Protection.
Eye test + first pair of glasses.
Parental Benefits: Generous Enhanced Maternity and Enhanced Partner (Paternity) Leave.

Equal Opportunities Statement
Diversity and inclusion are hugely important to us, and we’re committed to providing equal opportunities for all. We’re actively recruiting for a diverse and inclusive workforce so want to ensure we do everything we can to support your application. We want you to feel safe and empowered to let us know if you need any adjustments to be made to your application or interview process, so please speak to our recruitment team.

AI Statement
We champion tech that helps people work smarter, but we want to get to know you! If you use AI to assist with your application or interview prep, please ensure all information submitted remains an accurate, truthful representation of your personal achievements and capabilities rather than generating false or misleading information. We may reject applications where AI is used inappropriately at any stage of the recruitment process.