Data Principal in Leeds

Who We Are:

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.

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 Principal (hands-on Architect) to lead the local Data & AI Practice and expand our Data capability. This pivotal role supporting the local club leadership requires a balance of leading on client, leading the data practice proposition in the local market and building upon our existing data skills and capability from your experience. 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 data solutions using Microsoft Azure and/or AWS native services, with development to production experience in Snowflake, Databricks or Fabric, managing delivery with an Agile mindset.
• 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). In addition to Microsoft Azure, leveraging core technologies in the AI Foundry ecosystem, 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 the following data architecture design patterns RAG (Retrieval-Augmented-Generation), Serverless, DWH models, Data Mesh and Data Products.
• 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.

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.