Principal Data Engineer (m/f/d)

Confirmed live in the last 24 hours

Thoughtworks

Amsterdam, Netherlands

On-site

Posted April 22, 2026

Job Description

Principal data engineers at Thoughtworks, are strategic leaders who spearhead data engineering initiatives, tackle complex business challenges and uncover transformative insights. They possess a deep understanding of a client's business ecosystem and partner with executives to align technology strategies with business objectives. By contextualizing emerging trends and Thoughtworks' exploration, they expand the impact of data engineering within the client organization.

They draw upon their profound expertise in developing modern data architectures and infrastructure for the management of data applications.

Effective collaboration is paramount, as data engineers adeptly convey their discoveries to both technical and non-technical stakeholders. They stay abreast of industry advancements, ensure data quality and security, and provide mentorship to junior team members.

At Thoughtworks, data engineers leverage their deep technical knowledge to solve complex business problems, making a significant impact on client success.

Job responsibilities

You will collaborate with sales and pre-sales to clarify requirements and design viable solutions and drive pursuits with technical stakeholders.
You will establish a clear vision and direction for the data paradigm/practices, aligning it with the overall business strategy.
You will collaborate with executive level stakeholders to understand their strategic objectives and identify opportunities to leverage data and data quality.
You will consult on complex data platform programs, synchronizing cross-cutting architectural concerns and providing client-facing technical leadership and guidance as a data subject matter expert.
You will be responsible to create, design and develop intricate data processing pipelines, addressing clients' most challenging problems.
You will collaborate with data scientists to design scalable implementation and production of their models.
You will write clean and iterative code based on TDD and leverage various continuous delivery practices to deploy, support and operate data pipelines.
You will design and implement the strategy around data governance, data security and data privacy to support business and compliance requirements.
You will represent Thoughtworks in various online and offline forums, including events and conferences.

Job qualifications

Technical Skills

You must have extensive pre-sales experience and a proven ability to independently drive complex pursuits and create winning commercial proposals.
You have experience leading enterprise data strategy, system design, and the end-to-end implementation of large-scale technical solutions.
You are a native-level German speaker (C1) who is comfortable driving consensus and managing expectations with senior technical stakeholders.
You possess hands-on experience in system design using Domain-Driven Design principles for complex enterprise organizations with multiple domains.
Working with data excites you; you have designed Big Data architectures, built and operated data pipelines, and managed data storage within distributed systems.
You have a deep understanding of data modeling and practical experience with modern data engineering tools, platforms, and cloud warehousing solutions.
You are a "hands-on" leader—equally happy writing production-grade code as you are leading a team to implement a vision.
You have built and deployed large-scale data pipelines and data-centric applications using distributed storage and processing platforms in production environments.
You have experience designing and developing streaming solutions (Cloud or On-premise) leveraging leading technologies and industry best practices.
You have experience implementing data governance and security policies, complemented by a solid understanding of MLOps and data science concepts.