Principal Data Engineer (m/f/d)

• You will collaborate with sales and pre-sales to clarify requirements, design viable solutions and independently drive complex pursuits with technical and executive stakeholders.
• You will establish a clear vision and direction for the data paradigm and 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 as a data subject-matter expert.
• You will 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 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 grow the capability around you, mentoring engineers and building out the next generation of the team.
• You lead through influence rather than headcount: growing capability and raising delivery standards inside the organisation, while building our presence in the market through thought leadership, ecosystem initiatives and client-facing points of view.

Technical Skills

• You must have extensive pre-sales experience and a proven ability to independently drive complex pursuits and create winning commercial proposals.
• You are equally happy coding and leading a team to implement a solution, and you stay hands-on in at least one or two core technologies.
• You have experience in system design using Domain-Driven Design for enterprise organisations with various domains.
• Working with data excites you; you have created big-data architecture, can build and operate data pipelines, and maintain data storage within distributed systems.
• You have a deep understanding of data modeling and experience with modern data engineering tools and platforms, along with cloud warehousing tools.
• You have built and deployed large-scale data pipelines and data-centric applications using distributed storage and processing platforms in a production setting.
• You have experience designing and developing real-time and low-latency data streaming solutions (cloud and locally hosted).
• You have experience with data visualization techniques and can communicate the insights as per the audience.
• You have experience defining and implementing data governance and security policies, and knowledge of MLOps and data science concepts.

Professional Skills

• You have worked in a consultancy or professional-services environment within the last five years, driving data and AI engagements end to end (recent examples matter more than historical ones).
• You can point to data and AI pursuits you helped win and shape within the last three to five years, including deals from around €3M upwards, and you can speak concretely to their commercial shape, trade-offs and delivery.
• You have grown a practice, capability or go-to-market asset, for example a reusable accelerator taken to market, combining solutioning, sales and delivery with tangible business outcomes.
• You stay genuinely hands-on: you can build alongside your team when it counts and are comfortable being the deepest engineer in the room.
• You bring significant hands-on and leadership experience in data and AI (typically 10+ years) and, above all, the appetite to keep building: growing accounts, teams and capability rather than only overseeing them.
• You have fluent German skills (C1)

Learning & Development

There is no one-size-fits-all career path at Thoughtworks: however you want to develop your career is entirely up to you. But we also balance autonomy with the strength of our cultivation culture. This means your career is supported by interactive tools, numerous development programs and teammates who want to help you grow. We see value in helping each other be our best and that extends to empowering our employees in their career journeys.

Country: Germany Location: Cologne; Hamburg; Munich; Stuttgart Date Posted: 08-18-2026 Industry: Information Technology Employment Type: Employee