Role Summary The Principal Engineer is the senior technical authority responsible for setting the engineering direction, ensuring platform reliability, and driving innovation across a critical enterprise technology domain. This role provides deep technical leadership, shapes long term strategy, and ensures that engineering teams deliver secure, scalable, and resilient services that underpin the organisation's digital ecosystem. The Principal Engineer acts as the highest level hands on expert, partnering with architects, product owners, and engineering squads to define standards, modernise platforms, and embed automation and DevOps practices across all services. Technical Leadership
• Serve as the domain's foremost technical expert, accountable for engineering excellence and long term platform strategy.
• Define and maintain technical standards, patterns, and best practices across the domain.
• Lead complex design decisions, ensuring solutions are secure, scalable, and aligned with enterprise architecture.
• Drive adoption of automation, DevOps tooling, and platform as a product principles across all engineering teams. Platform Ownership
• Oversee the health, performance, and lifecycle of core platforms within the domain.
• Ensure capacity planning, resilience, backup, recovery, and disaster readiness are embedded into all services.
• Champion observability, monitoring, and proactive incident prevention. Innovation & Modernisation
• Identify opportunities to modernise legacy platforms, reduce technical debt, and introduce new technologies.
• Evaluate emerging tools, frameworks, and architectures relevant to the domain.
• Lead proof of concepts and guide engineering teams through adoption. Collaboration & Influence
• Partner with cross domain Principal Engineers to ensure cohesive enterprise wide engineering standards.
• Work closely with product, security, architecture, and operations teams to deliver integrated solutions.
• Mentor senior engineers and uplift engineering capability across the organisation. Governance & Risk Management
• Ensure compliance with security, regulatory, and operational standards.
• Provide technical oversight for major changes, upgrades, and transformation initiatives.
• Act as an escalation point for critical incidents and complex technical challenges. Job Description: Principal Storage & Data Protection Engineer Role Summary We're looking for a Principal Storage & Data Protection Engineer to design, operate, and optimise enterprise grade storage platforms that support mission critical workloads. This role spans file, object, and block storage technologies, vendor platforms such as Dell, HPE, and Pure, and robust data protection and vaulting solutions. You'll ensure our storage estate is resilient, scalable, secure, and aligned with business continuity requirements. Key Responsibilities Enterprise Storage Engineering
• Design, deploy, and manage file, object, and block storage solutions across on premises and hybrid environments.
• Operate storage platforms from vendors such as Dell EMC (PowerStore, Isilon, VMAX), HPE (3PAR, Primera, Alletra), and Pure Storage (FlashArray, FlashBlade).
• Monitor storage performance, capacity, and health, ensuring optimal utilisation and adherence to SLAs.
• Implement storage zoning, provisioning, replication, and tiering strategies to support diverse workloads.
• Troubleshoot complex storage issues and collaborate with vendors or internal teams to resolve them. Data Protection & Vault Solutions
• Design and maintain enterprise backup and recovery solutions, including vaulting and air gapped architectures.
• Manage backup platforms and technologies (e.g., Dell Data Domain, Veeam, Commvault, NetBackup).
• Ensure compliance with RPO/RTO requirements and regulatory standards.
• Conduct regular backup validation, restoration testing, and disaster recovery exercises.
• Implement automation and monitoring to ensure backup integrity and operational consistency. Resilience, Security & Governance
• Apply security best practices across storage and backup platforms, including encryption, access controls, and audit logging.
• Support data retention policies, lifecycle management, and governance frameworks.
• Ensure storage and data protection solutions align with business continuity and cyber resilience strategies. Skills & Experience Essential
• Hands on experience with enterprise storage platforms (Dell, HPE, Pure, or similar).
• Strong understanding of file, object, and block storage architectures.
• Experience with enterprise backup and recovery technologies.
• Knowledge of replication, snapshotting, and disaster recovery patterns.
• Familiarity with storage networking (SAN/NAS), Fibre Channel, and iSCSI.
• Ability to diagnose complex storage and data protection issues. Desirable
• Experience with cloud based storage and backup services.
• Knowledge of cyber vaulting, immutable backups, and ransomware resilient architectures.
• Exposure to automation tools for storage provisioning and monitoring.
• Understanding of performance analytics and capacity planning methodologies.
• Experience integrating storage with virtualisation, container platforms, or mainframe environments.
Skills
dell
hpe
pure
Job Title: Principle Engineer - Storgage & Data
Location: Manchester, UK
Rate/Salary: GBP Daily
Job Type: Contract
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