Principal Data Engineer
Indicium AI · Lisbon
About Indicium AI
Indicium AI is trusted by the world's leading enterprises to deliver AI into production at scale. We are a global AI-native consultancy with proven experience across Financial Services, Energy & Utilities, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Retail & CPG, and Manufacturing. From strategy, to build, to business outcomes, we unlock value from AI with unmatched clarity, speed, and capability.
Powered by 600+ AI experts serving 50+ enterprise clients from 5 global locations, we work side-by-side with top partners - including Anthropic, Databricks, AWS, OpenAI, and Microsoft - to deliver modern AI with speed and measurable impact.
Opportunity
As a Principal Data Engineer at Indicium AI, you will join a team of AI and data practitioners delivering enterprise-grade information architecture for leading organisations across Europe. Working within complex client engagements, with a strong focus on Financial Services, you will lead data modelling and semantic architecture, shape data platform standards, and guide engineering teams in building AI-ready data products. This is an opportunity to operate as a true design authority, driving architectural rigour while making a measurable impact on clients' data strategies from day one.
Responsibilities
Data Modelling & Architecture
- Lead and contribute to conceptual, logical, and physical data model design aligned to client architectures, translating business requirements into rigorous data structures in collaboration with engineering and domain teams.
- Govern and maintain data models in appropriate tooling, enforcing naming conventions, domain standards, and versioning across source, integration, and consumption layers.
- Define and steward canonical data entities and lineage, and guide teams on the design and effective use of semantic data models, including their application to agentic AI solutions.
Semantic & Knowledge Modelling
- Design and maintain semantic models to support agentic-AI capabilities, integrating semantic layers with business glossaries, data catalogues, and lineage tooling.
- Help develop ontologies, taxonomies, and controlled vocabularies underpinning enterprise metadata and search, and define semantic modelling standards and patterns to ensure consistent meaning, interoperability, and AI readiness across data products.
- Guide and govern the creation of data domains aligned with the client's underlying business capabilities.
Data Engineering & Platforms
- Design data product schemas across platforms including Azure, Snowflake, and Databricks, encompassing Delta Lake structures and interoperable patterns, and define architectural guardrails for performance, scalability, security, and cost efficiency.
- Set design standards and review transformations and pipelines for compliance, embedding data contract standards and data quality frameworks across pipeline outputs.
Agentic AI & AI-Assisted Development
- Leverage Snowflake Cortex, Databricks Genie, or equivalent tooling to help engineering teams deliver natural language query and LLM-augmented data products.
- Utilise GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, or similar AI coding assistants to accelerate modelling, documentation, and pipeline development.
- Design and define a set of agentic skills that can be provided to implementation teams, and contribute to the firm's AI Champion network, evaluating emerging capabilities and advising on adoption.
Enterprise Architecture & Design Assurance
- Act as a design authority for data architecture across teams and data domains, partnering with enterprise, security, and risk architecture to ensure data solutions align with broader technology and regulatory standards.
- Provide early-stage architectural input to initiative discovery and solution design to reduce delivery risk.
Governance & Stakeholder Engagement
- Present architecture decisions to senior stakeholders, architecture review boards, and regulatory audiences, and support regulatory compliance through robust lineage, metadata management, and data quality evidence.
- Mentor junior architects and engineers within the Information Architecture community of practice.
Requirements (These are || not &&)
At Indicium AI we believe in personal growth and professional development, and are convinced that the perfect candidate is one that continuously learns. Therefore, these requirements are an || and not an &&
- Experience: 8+ years in data architecture, data engineering, or information management, with proven enterprise data modelling experience at conceptual, logical, and physical levels.
- Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Data Science, Engineering, or a related discipline.
- Data Platforms: Practical Snowflake and Databricks experience, including Cortex AI and Genie; familiarity with Azure data services.
- Transformation Tooling: Proven experience with dbt Labs in production environments.
- Programming & Integration: Good Python skills
Nice to have
- Data Vault 2.1 alongside Kimball/Star-schema modelling
- Data mesh, data product ownership and federated governance
- Knowledge graph platforms (Neo4j, Neptune, Stardog) or graph query languages
- Published thought leadership or community contributions in data or AI
Why Indicium AI
- Fast-growing start-up organisation with huge opportunity for career growth
- Highly competitive salary package along with company bonus
- A hugely collaborative working environment where every person’s viewpoint is considered - a chance to make your mark on the business from day one!
- Financially backed business meaning security and support for new initiatives and global market expansion
- Pick your own Gear! Macbooks, PCs, Accessories!
- Drive your development with a personal learning budget
Benefits
- Holiday Entitlement - 25 days holiday plus bank holidays
- Learning & Development: 1.500€ training budget + 5 training days
- Company Bonus - Discretionary company and personal bonus paid quarterly
- Pension Scheme
- Choose Your Kit - Select from a range of laptops and accessories
- Social Events: meeting - Ups, Squad events, Summer/ Christmas events, etc.
- And many others.