Principal Software Engineer - Data

Oxford Economics’ data platform is entering a new phase of growth, with increased scale, visibility, and business importance. We are investing to improve resilience, scalability, and operational simplicity so teams across the business can innovate and deliver client value with confidence. We are seeking an ambitious, self‑motivated Principal Software Engineer to provide technical and strategic leadership for the Data team and shape the platform’s evolution. This role exists to bridge technology and business priorities, set architectural direction, define reliability standards, and scale delivery practices to match our expanding data needs. As a hands‑on leader with a strong data and architectural focus, you will have impact both through direct contribution and the technical leverage you create. You will guide design decisions, improve system health, and embed reliability and operational excellence into how we build and operate.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner with product, business, and executive stakeholders to align platform strategy with business goals, ensuring data capabilities support client value.
• Design, build, and evolve resilient data flows from internal and external sources through to client‑facing products.
• Establish platform observability as a first class concern, ensuring issues are detected early, diagnosed quickly, and understood clearly across the team.
• Introduce and maintain data quality controls that prevent downstream disruption and build trust in platform outputs.
• Lead and de‑risk migrations, setting patterns that ensure safety, repeatability, and minimal client impact.
• Own platform performance and cost efficiency, defining strategies that anticipate scale and guide technical decisions.
• Build and maintain backend services and APIs that power Databank products and internal workflows.
• Collaborate on security and access control patterns, including role‑based access and data‑level permissions.
• Improve developer experience and delivery practices (CI/CD, automation, tooling) that help teams move faster safely.
• Contribute to frontend systems where needed to ensure data is delivered effectively to customers.

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise Required

• Significant professional experience delivering and evolving business‑critical production systems end‑to‑end, with clear examples of platform‑level ownership and long‑term impact.
• Expert‑level proficiency in C#/.NET and TypeScript, with demonstrated ability to lead architecture and implementation across complex production systems.
• Deep, hands‑on SQL and analytical data platform experience, including designing schemas, building ingestion patterns, and optimising for large datasets on columnar databases (e.g. Snowflake and/or ClickHouse), with a strong understanding of performance and cost trade‑offs.
• Proven track record of improving reliability and operability at scale, including observability, incident leadership, post‑incident improvement, automation, and test strategy.
• Strong experience with cloud infrastructure and modern engineering practices, and the ability to apply them pragmatically to real production systems.

Desired

• Azure experience (or strong equivalent cloud experience with ability to transfer).
• Experience integrating external data providers and handling evolving schemas/contracts.
• Familiarity with data quality frameworks/patterns (e.g. validation layers, SLAs, anomaly detection) and/or orchestration tools.
• Exposure to ISO27001‑aligned practices or working in security‑conscious environments.

Behavioural competencies

• Ownership at platform scale, seeing problems through across teams until durable improvements are in place.
• System‑level problem solving, breaking down complex, cross‑cutting issues and addressing root causes.
• Influential communication, aligning engineers, product, and business stakeholders around technical direction and trade‑offs.
• Customer empathy, understanding how platform behaviour impacts economists and end users.
• Setting technical direction, gaining alignment, and sequencing work for maximum impact.
• Raising the engineering bar, you elevate quality through hands‑on involvement, patterns, and example.
• Mentoring and supporting other engineers through pairing, feedback, and knowledge sharing.
• Calm under pressure, bringing clarity during incidents and focusing teams on resolution and prevention.

Technical competencies

• You practise and promote strong XP practices, including pairing, TDD, refactoring, simple design, and frequent releases.
• You design and evolve end‑to‑end data platform architectures that support high‑volume, business‑critical datasets.
• You lead on reliability engineering, embedding observability, resilience, and safe operational patterns across the platform.
• You guide platform‑wide performance and scalability decisions, diagnosing systemic bottlenecks as data and usage grow.
• You design secure data access patterns, embedding authentication, authorisation, and least‑privilege access by default.
• You enable modern delivery through CI/CD, trunk‑based development, and safe release practices that support frequent change.

Key Working Relationships

• Internal: Software Developers / Product Owners, IT Operations / Salesforce, Economists / Consulting Teams
• External: Cloud providers, Software / SaaS vendors

What Success Looks Like

In the first 90 days:

• Establish a shared understanding of the end‑to‑end data lifecycle, system ownership, and key drivers of operational friction.
• Deliver 1–2 high‑impact improvements end‑to‑end, from concept through hands‑on delivery, measurably reducing recurring operational issues.

In 6 months:

• Shift the team’s balance from reactive work toward planned delivery and proactive continuous improvement.
• Introduce clear measures for platform health and operational load, and drive sustained improvement, setting the bar for reliability.

In 12 months:

• Set and guide the technical evolution of the platform to support growth in data, users, and use cases.
• Embed a lasting culture of reliability and quality by default, with clear ownership and meaningful health metrics.
• Shape the data platform roadmap, incorporating major technology shifts and business strategy to drive a simpler, more scalable platform.

Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO)

Oxford Economics is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any kind based on race, color, sex, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other protected characteristic as outlined by federal, state, or local laws.

Job Benefits

Here are some of the benefits we offer in the UK to ensure you feel valued, supported, and thrive at work:

• Private Healthcare
• Employee Assistance Program
• Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave
• Workplace Nursery Scheme
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Hybrid/Flexible Working
• Team Gatherings and Connection Boost!