Principal Data Engineer

Serko is a cutting-edge tech platform in global business travel & expense technology. When you join Serko, you become part of a team of passionate travellers and technologists bringing people together, using the world's leading business travel marketplace. We are proud to be an equal-opportunity employer, we embrace the richness of diversity, showing up authentically to create a positive impact.

Make an impact

Define and drive the technical strategy for our growing, global Data Engineering function, aligning with the wider data strategy to deliver outcomes across data science, agentic AI, and operational and analytical data needs. As the technical authority for data engineering, you'll set the standard for how we design, build, and evolve our modern data platform - spanning multi-cloud infrastructure across Azure and Google Cloud, data warehousing on Snowflake and BigQuery, and pipelines that serve teams across the business.

You'll work closely with Architecture, Analytics, Security, and Cloud infrastructure teams to ensure our data solutions are performant, secure, and built to scale. You'll champion best practices across data governance, observability, and engineering quality, and play a key role in shaping how we grow and mature our data engineering capability globally - guiding and mentoring data engineers across both local and international teams.

What you’ll be doing

• Collaborate with architects and principal software engineers and provide technical expertise in selecting new or Own the technical direction of the Data Engineering function, setting standards for how data pipelines, models, and platforms are designed, built, and evolved across the business
• Partner with Architecture, Platform, Security, and Cloud infrastructure teams to ensure data solutions are performant, secure, durable, and built to scale
• Lead evaluation and proof-of-concept work to validate new technologies, platforms, and approaches - including emerging capabilities in data science and agentic AI
• Drive best practices across the full data engineering lifecycle: ingestion, transformation, orchestration, data modelling, governance, observability, and security
• Champion engineering excellence through strong CI/CD practices, code quality standards, and DevOps culture across the Data Engineering team
• Lead the team at a technical level - involved in design decisions, code reviews, and hands-on delivery where it matters most
• Guide and mentor data engineers locally and globally, raising the technical bar across the team
• Translate long-term data strategy into actionable, sequenced initiatives - balancing tactical delivery with strategic progress
• Optimise data and deployment pipelines for performance, reliability, and cost efficiency across Snowflake, BigQuery, Azure, and Google Cloud
• Work closely with Marketing, Finance, Product, and other business teams to understand their data needs and deliver solutions that drive meaningful outcomes

What you’ll bring to the team

• Deep expertise in modern data architecture, data modelling, and data warehousing - including Star Schema, Data Vault 2.0, and lakehouse patterns
• Hands-on experience across multi-cloud data platforms, particularly Azure and Google Cloud, with tools such as Snowflake, BigQuery, Data Factory, and dbt
• Strong command of dbt, SQL, and Python, with a solid understanding of CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and DevOps practices in a data context
• Experience with data governance, metadata management, cataloguing, and observability at scale
• Familiarity with data science workflows and AI/ML enablement, including emerging agentic AI patterns
• A track record of mentoring and growing engineering talent, and raising technical standards across teams
• Demonstrated ability to influence and drive change across multiple teams and stakeholders - including at senior and executive levels
• Strong communication skills with the ability to translate complex technical concepts for business audiences across Marketing, Finance, Product, and beyond
• A strategic mindset balanced with a willingness to get hands-on when it counts

At Serko, we aim to create a place where people can come and do their best work. This means you will be operating in an environment with great tools and support to enable you to perform at the highest level of your abilities, producing high-quality and delivering innovative and efficient results. Our people are fully engaged, continuously improving, and encouraged to make an impact.

Some of the benefits of working at Serko are:

• A competitive base salary
• KiwiSaver covered with employee contribution matched up to 3% of salary, and life insurance.
• Health & Wellbeing: discounted Southern Cross Health Insurance, access to confidential support, guidance and counselling service, wellbeing and voluntary leave and free flu shots.
• Focus on development: access to a learning & development platform, committed budget and opportunity for you to own your career pathways.