ComplyAdvantage

Financial Services

PrincipalDataEngineer

£130–180k ~AI est. London, England, United Kingdom Remote Friendly
Market Sentiment
HIGH DEMAND

Neural analysis suggests this role is
optimal for Lead candidates.

The Brief

“Principal Data Engineer at ComplyAdvantage. Skills: Data platform architecture, Distributed systems, Cloud architecture, Data engineering. Lead design of data platform. Lead evolution of data platform”

What You'll Achieve.

Detect money laundering; Detect terrorist financing; Detect sanctions evasion; Detect financial crime; Ship new detection models; Ship risk signals; Automate KYC; Automate AML; Automate sanctions reviews; Cut onboarding times; Reduce false positives; Handle more work

Industry & Context.

Financial Services
Problems you'll solve

Root cause analysis; Troubleshooting; Data-driven decision making

What They're Looking For.

Must Have

Substantial experience designing production-grade data platforms, Deep expertise in distributed data systems, Production Python experience, Experience designing for cloud, Experience designing for containerised infrastructure, Track record of treating data quality as first-class concern, Track record of treating observability as first-class concern, Track record of treating data contracts as first-class concern, Working understanding of logging tooling for data systems, Working understanding of monitoring tooling for data systems, Working understanding of alerting tooling for data systems, Working understanding of incident management tooling for data systems, Ownership of software and data products, Track record of coaching engineers, Track record of helping recruiting improve hiring, Track record of helping recruiting improve onboarding

Nice to Have

Experience building data systems in financial services, Experience building data systems in AML, Experience building data systems in KYC, Experience building data systems in fraud, Experience building data systems in regtech, Experience building data systems in regulated domain, Experience operating data systems in financial services, Experience operating data systems in AML, Experience operating data systems in KYC, Experience operating data systems in fraud, Experience operating data systems in regtech, Experience operating data systems in regulated domain, Familiarity with knowledge graph problems, Familiarity with entity resolution problems, Experience supporting ML workloads, Experience supporting LLM workloads, Experience supporting agentic AI workloads, Experience representing engineering externally at conferences, Experience representing engineering externally at meet-ups, Experience representing engineering externally in technical publications

What You'll Do.

Lead design of data platform

Lead evolution of data platform

Set technical direction for data infrastructure

Partner with Engineering leadership

Partner with Data Science leadership

Partner with Product leadership

Partner with SRE leadership

Tackle hard data problems

Represent ComplyAdvantage at events

Lead architectural design of data systems

Shape engineering team ways of working

Set data quality standards

Set tooling standards

Ship work with direct impact

Improve hiring process

Coach engineers across organisation

Architect petabyte-scale data platforms

Design data platform lineage

Design data platform quality

Design data platform freshness

Design data platform observability

Build foundational data infrastructure

Evolve foundational data infrastructure

Set standard for event-sourced patterns

Set standard for streaming patterns

Drive consistency in data production

Drive consistency in data consumption

Design data services for scale

Design data services for ease of operation

Write maintainable Python code

Write performant Python code

Write well-tested Python code

Review code of others

Partner with ML engineers

Partner with data scientists

Support feature engineering at scale

Support training pipelines at scale

Support online inference at scale

Set data quality standards for teams

Set schema evolution standards for teams

Set contract testing standards for teams

Integrate data platform with services

Consume event streams

Produce documentation for self-service

Coach staff engineers

Coach senior engineers

Coach mid-level engineers

Build bench of future leaders

Own technical architecture of data platform

Lead architecture supporting ML teams

Lead architecture supporting data science teams

Lead architecture supporting product teams

Design data foundations for agentic AI

Design retrieval pipelines

Design grounding sources

Design event histories

Work with Customer Risk tribe

Work with Fraud tribe

Work with Knowledge Graph tribe

Work with Screening tribe

Set technical direction for data ingestion

Set technical direction for data normalization

Set technical direction for data merging

Be deciding voice on data architecture decisions

Make company-wide data architecture decisions

Make make-or-buy choices

Define long-term vendor strategy

Define long-term tooling strategy

How You'll Work.

Team & Collaboration

Cross-tribe initiatives; Engineering teams; Data Science teams; Product teams; SRE teams; ML engineers; Data scientists; Customer Risk tribe; Fraud tribe; Knowledge Graph tribe; Screening tribe

Communication Scope

Written communication; Verbal communication; Technical documentation; Executive presentations

Process & Methodology

Roadmap planning

Full Job Description

What you will be doing We are looking for an experienced Principal Data Engineer to lead the design and evolution of the data platform that powers our AML/KYC and Fraud products. Our platform depends on ingesting, transforming and serving billions of signals every day: sanctions and watchlist data, adverse media, corporate registries, transaction events and customer records, all flowing into a real-time financial crime intelligence knowledge graph used by thousands of customers across the world. As a Principal Data Engineer you will set the medium to long term technical direction for our data infrastructure. You will partner with Engineering, Data Science, Product and SRE leadership on cross-tribe initiatives, coach engineers at every level, and tackle the data problems that no single team can solve alone. You will also represent ComplyAdvantage at engineering and industry events. Your impact will shape the data foundations on which ComplyAdvantage's AI, screening and monitoring products are built. Your work will directly affect how quickly and accurately our customers can detect money laundering, terrorist financing, sanctions evasion and other financial crime, and make that crime a thing of the past. Scope of the role Scope of Principal Engineers at ComplyAdvantage Sets the medium to long term technical direction for the data domain, working with the VP of Engineering and senior data science, data governance and engineering leaders. Leads the architectural design of complex, business-critical data systems that span multiple tribes and affect the whole company. Shapes how engineering teams work across the organisation, including data quality standards, tooling and ways of working. Tackles the hardest data problems and ships work with direct impact on company goals. Acts as an active interviewer, helps improving the hiring process, and coaches engineers across the engineering organisation. Represents ComplyAdvantage at meet-ups, conferences and industry forums. Data

Free ATS check

Applying for this Principal Data Engineer role?

Most applicants get filtered before a human reads their resume. See if yours makes the cut.

ANONYMOUS · UNFILTERED

What do employees actually say about ComplyAdvantage?

Real rants from real employees. Read before you apply.

Read Company Rants →