CreateFuture is a digital consultancy focused on building digital products and services for major organisations.
About the role and team
We are looking for a Principal Data Engineer to join our Data Practice and own the technical direction of our iGaming data engineering capability. You'll work with the world’s largest betting and gaming operators, processing hundreds of millions of events per day across sportsbook, casino, exchange, and lottery platforms.
A Principal at CreateFuture defines the hardest data engineering problems in iGaming: petabyte-scale migrations, sub‑millisecond event pipelines, settlement reconciliation at bookmaker scale, and the data foundations that keep operators compliant with gambling regulators globally.
You will influence the shape of engagements from pre‑sales through to delivery, grow engineering talent, and be a recognizable voice for CreateFuture in the iGaming market.
What you’ll be doing Technical leadership
- Defining and owning the data engineering architecture patterns CreateFuture uses across iGaming engagements — migration frameworks, streaming architectures, data integrity standards, and Lakehouse design
- Acting as the most senior technical authority on client engagements — making critical architecture decisions, resolving design disputes, and setting the bar for quality
- Reviewing and signing off technical designs produced by Lead and Senior engineers across active engagements
- Identifying and driving adoption of new tooling, patterns, and AWS services that improve delivery outcomes across the iGaming practice
Delivery
- Leading the technical design and execution of large‑scale data migrations — moving high‑volume transactional and event data from on‑premises or legacy cloud estates to AWS, without loss of fidelity or operational continuity
- Architecting real‑time and near‑real‑time data pipelines for sportsbook and in‑play use cases — odds feeds, market events, bet placement streams, and settlement pipelines — where latency and correctness are non‑negotiable
- Designing and enforcing data integrity frameworks across betting, trading, and customer data domains — including reconciliation between source and target systems, anomaly detection, and audit trail requirements
- Overseeing the implementation of regulatory and compliance reporting pipelines that meet the requirements of the UK Gambling Commission and international licensing bodies
- Working with AWS services including S3, Glue, Lambda, Athena, Redshift, RDS, Kinesis, MSK, Lake Formation, Step Functions, and MWAA — selecting the right tool for each problem rather than defaulting to a stack
Practice and people
- Mentoring and growing Lead and Senior Data Engineers — through code review, pairing, architecture sessions, and career conversations
- Building the iGaming data engineering playbook: reusable patterns, accelerators, and reference architectures that reduce time‑to‑value on new engagements
- Contributing to hiring — defining what great looks like for data engineering roles and playing an active part in assessment
- Representing CreateFuture externally — at industry events, in technical blog posts, and in client‑facing settings — as a credible voice on iGaming data engineering
Commercial
- Shaping and leading technical responses to iGaming opportunities — scoping complex engagements, writing architecture proposals, and presenting to senior client stakeholders
- Identifying expansion opportunities within existing client relationships — spotting data engineering problems we can help solve and framing them as propositions
- Partnering with AWS on joint go‑to‑market activity where relevant, leveraging CreateFuture's Advanced Partner status
What we’re looking for
- Extensive experience working in or closely with sportsbook, exchange, or casino platforms — understanding the data models, operational pressures, and regulatory constraints from the inside
- Led or made decisive contributions to large‑scale data migrations in iGaming — moving live betting, customer, or trading data at scale while maintaining integrity and uptime
- Designed or owned low‑latency data pipelines where correctness and throughput are both critical — odds ingestion, in‑play event streams, bet settlement, or equivalent
- Understands what data integrity means in a regulated gambling context: reconciliation, audit trails, lineage, and the consequences of getting it wrong
- AWS is the primary cloud and can design across the full data engineering stack — from ingestion and streaming through to warehousing, serving, and cost optimisation
- Deep experience with streaming architectures — Kinesis, Kafka/MSK, Flink, or Spark Streaming — and knows when each is the right choice
- Can model cost implications of architecture decisions and advise clients on trade‑offs between throughput, latency, durability, and spend
- AWS certification at professional or specialty level is strongly preferred
- Mastery of Python, SQL, and Spark — and strong opinions on how they should be used in production data pipelines
- Deep experience with dbt, Airflow, or equivalent orchestration — including how to build pipelines that are testable, observable, and operationally sound
- Strong understanding of data quality engineering — not just validation rules, but how to build systems that detect and surface integrity issues before they reach consumers
- Comfortable with infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform, AWS CDK) and treating data platform infrastructure as a first‑class engineering concern
Consultancy and leadership
- Operated at Principal or equivalent level — making architectural decisions that affect multiple teams, and being accountable for their outcomes
- Comfortable in C‑suite and VP‑level client conversations, translating technical complexity into business risk and opportunity
- Can hold a room on a difficult technical topic and reach a decision — not just present options
- Has grown engineering talent around them and takes it seriously as a leadership responsibility
Primary cloud
AWS — Glue, Lambda, Athena, S3, Redshift, RDS, Kinesis, MSK, Lake Formation, Step Functions, MWAA
Languages
Python, SQL, Spark
Platforms
Databricks, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift
Other technical tools
Great Expectations, dbt tests, reconciliation frameworks, data observability tooling
IaC / DevOps
Terraform, AWS CDK
Certification
AWS Professional or Specialty level strongly preferred
What we’ll offer you
We trust people to do their best work. That means flexibility over rigid rules, impact over activity, and real investment in your growth both professionally and personally. You’ll be part of a supportive and friendly culture, surrounded by smart, curious people who care deeply about what they do.
We offer flexible working, including hybrid and remote options. Our office hubs are located in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London, and Bulgaria, with occasional travel to client sites or CreateFuture offices when needed.
We trust you to manage your time balancing collaboration with client time and focused work. What matters is the impact you have, not how busy you look.
Eligibility
Candidates for this role must be eligible to live and work in the UK.
Equal Opportunity
This is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and identities.