At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead the design of innovative data services and ensure data reliability across multiple products.
- Company: Join Black Duck Software, a pioneer in application security and data solutions.
- Benefits: Enjoy a hybrid work model, competitive salary, and opportunities for professional growth.
- Other info: Collaborative environment with flexible hours and minimal travel.
- Why this job: Make a real impact by building secure, high-quality data products that drive innovation.
- Qualifications: Extensive experience in data platforms, strong SQL and Python skills required.
The predicted salary is between 70000 - 90000 £ per year.
Black Duck Software, Inc. helps organizations build secure, high-quality software, minimising risks while maximising speed and productivity. Black Duck, a recognised pioneer in application security, provides SAST, SCA, and DAST solutions that enable teams to quickly find and fix vulnerabilities and defects in proprietary code, open source components, and application behaviour.
What you’ll do:
- Lead the design and build-out of cross-product data services for multiple product lines from one governed data plane.
- Define the “customer data plane” model: canonical customer identifiers, shared dimensions, and consistent facts used across products.
- Build and operationalise ingestion patterns for batch, streaming, and event data, with repeatable onboarding for new sources.
- Own the operational playbook for data reliability: data contracts, quality checks, lineage, monitoring, and incident response.
- Implement and run access methods that make data usable: curated datasets, secure query interfaces, and product-ready data APIs where needed.
- Productise customer-facing data products (datasets, metrics, exports, and feeds) with versioning, documentation, and clear ownership.
- Design data models that fit both operational systems (RDS) and analytics stores (columnar/OLAP), including performance and cost tuning.
- Ensure data products also power ML workflows: trusted training datasets, feature-ready outputs, and consistent definitions for decision-making.
- Enable AI automation by delivering reliable, low-latency, governed data products that can be used safely in automated workflows.
- Partner closely with product, engineering, and security stakeholders to align data products to roadmap priorities and customer outcomes.
- Raise the technical bar through architecture reviews, standards, and mentoring—while staying hands-on in key systems.
Required:
- Significant experience building and operating production data platforms at scale, including on-call and operational ownership.
- Strong SQL skills and strong Python skills, used to build pipelines, services, and automation.
- Hands-on experience running cloud systems on AWS and Google Cloud (IaaS level: compute, storage, networking, IAM).
- Practical experience with both operational databases (RDS-style) and analytics stores (columnar/OLAP), including performance tuning.
- Strong data modelling ability, including schema evolution, conformed dimensions, and “one source of truth” metric definitions.
- Track record of delivering data products that other teams or customers depend on, with clear contracts and reliability expectations.
- Ability to make sound engineering tradeoffs across latency, accuracy, cost, and security without creating brittle complexity.
- Experience with lakehouse patterns and open table formats (or similar), including governance and table maintenance.
- Experience with orchestration and streaming systems used in production (batch + real-time), and managing backfills safely.
- Familiarity with ML data needs (training/serving splits, feature-ready datasets, evaluation datasets) and AI-adjacent workflows.
Preferred:
- Experience building self-service data platforms (catalog, discoverability, access controls) used by multiple teams.
- Experience in regulated or security-sensitive environments, including retention, auditing, and data access controls.
Work model, location & travel:
- Location: Belfast, UK
- Reports to: VP of Data Engineering
- Work model: Hybrid (details TBD)
- Collaboration hours: Flexible; overlap with UK and US time zones
- Travel: Minimal
Black Duck considers all applicants for employment without regard to race, colour, religion, sex, gender preference, national origin, age, disability, or status as a Covered Veteran in accordance with federal law. In addition, Black Duck complies with applicable state and local laws prohibiting discrimination in employment in every jurisdiction in which it maintains facilities. Black Duck also provides reasonable accommodation to individuals with a disability in accordance with applicable laws.
Principal Data Engineer in Belfast employer: Black Duck Software
At Black Duck Software, Inc., we pride ourselves on fostering a dynamic and inclusive work environment where innovation thrives. As a DevOps Engineer 2, you'll be part of a collaborative Cloud Operations team that values your expertise in Google Cloud Platform while offering ample opportunities for professional growth and development. With a commitment to employee well-being and a culture that embraces cutting-edge technology, Black Duck is an exceptional employer for those seeking meaningful and rewarding careers in application security.
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We think this is how you could land Principal Data Engineer in Belfast
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We think you need these skills to ace Principal Data Engineer in Belfast
Some tips for your application 🫡
Show Off Your Projects:In the world of data science, your projects can speak volumes about your skills. Make sure to showcase a few key projects in your CV or portfolio, especially those that highlight your ability to work with data sets, build models, or use relevant tools like Python, R, or SQL. Don’t forget to include links to any GitHub repositories if applicable!
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Stand Out with Relevant Courses and Certifications:Although experience talks, relevant courses or certifications can be your ticket to impressing hiring managers at Black Duck Software. Mention any standout courses you've completed that equipped you with essential skills, such as machine learning certifications or data visualisation courses. This shows your commitment to continuously developing your skills in the field!
How to prepare for a job interview at Black Duck Software
✨Brush Up on Your Statistics
For a data science role, we need to seriously sharpen our statistics skills. Get ready to tackle technical questions on probability distributions, hypothesis testing, and regression analysis. These are often the bread and butter of data science interviews, so don't just skim over them!
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Prepare a killer portfolio showcasing your data science projects. We should include details about the datasets used, the tools and techniques applied, and the impact of your findings. If we can walk them through a particularly challenging project or a cool visualisation that had real-world implications, it’ll really make us stand out!
✨Get Comfortable with Python and R
Most data science positions require us to be proficient in programming languages like Python and R. We should practice common libraries like pandas, NumPy, and scikit-learn, and be ready for live coding exercises or algorithm questions. Showing off our coding chops can really impress the interviewers at Black Duck Software!
✨Prepare for Case Studies
Expect to encounter real-world case studies during the interview. We might be asked how we’d approach a data problem or analyse a dataset to extract insights. It's essential to think out loud and demonstrate our problem-solving process so that the interviewer can see our logical thinking in action.
