Principal Data Engineer

About the role

Netcompany is hiring a Principal Data Engineer in Athens to lead a small, high-caliber team of Data Engineers within its Data Intelligence & AI practice. The role builds the data foundations for clients' analytics and AI ambitions, designing cloud-native data lakes, lakehouses and medallion-architecture platforms on Azure, AWS or Databricks that are AI-ready, governed and scalable. It is a hands-on leadership position, staying close to the code and owning client engagement delivery end-to-end.

Key responsibilities

• Lead a small team of Cloud Data Management and Data Lake Engineers, covering planning, prioritisation, code reviews and mentoring.
• Own delivery of engagements end-to-end: scope, estimates, milestones, risks, quality and client communication.
• Design and build cloud-native data lakes and lakehouses (Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg) using medallion architecture on Azure, AWS or Databricks.
• Build and maintain ELT/ETL pipelines, data models and data quality / observability controls, orchestrated with tools such as Apache Airflow, Prefect, Dagster or Databricks Workflows.
• Adopt and promote AI coding assistants and agentic workflows in the team.
• Support the Data Analytics Lead on solution design, technical estimations and pre-sales, and align with sector and account stakeholders.
• Collaborate with AI/ML, BI and application teams so that data work serves analytics, AI and operational use cases.
• Apply engineering best practices: version control, CI/CD for data, IaC, DataOps, security and governance.

Required profile

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Data Science or a related field.
• 10+ years of experience in data engineering / cloud data management, including technical leadership of small teams or workstreams.
• Track record of delivering production data platform engagements, ideally cloud-native data lakes / lakehouses.
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with a coaching mindset.

Required skills

• Hands-on expertise with at least one major cloud data platform (Azure, AWS or Databricks), including data lake / lakehouse design and medallion architecture.
• Strong SQL and Python, plus ELT/ETL, data modelling and Spark (or equivalent distributed processing).
• Workflow orchestration and open table formats.
• Designing for performance, cost, security and data quality in cloud environments.

What we offer

• Hybrid working model in a modern environment.
• Seamless onboarding with a buddy.
• Competitive compensation and benefits, including health and life insurance.
• Meal and commuting allowance and on-premises well-being activities.
• Unlimited access to Udemy for Business and ad-hoc trainings.
• A personalised development plan.