Location: London, United Kingdom
Salary: £130,000 per annum
Industry: Engineering
Overview
We are seeking a Lead Data Engineer to design, build and own scalable data platforms that enable high-quality analytics, reporting and data-driven products. You will provide technical leadership across the data engineering function, set standards for reliability and governance, and partner with stakeholders to deliver trusted datasets and pipelines.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead the architecture and delivery of modern data platforms (lakehouse/warehouse) and robust ETL/ELT pipelines.
- Define engineering standards for code quality, testing, documentation, security and operational excellence.
- Own data modelling (dimensional, Data Vault and domain-oriented approaches) and optimise performance and cost.
- Implement orchestration, monitoring and alerting for data workflows; manage SLAs and incident response.
- Drive data governance: lineage, catalogue, access controls, retention policies and GDPR-aligned practices.
- Collaborate with analytics, software and platform teams to deliver reusable data products and APIs.
- Mentor engineers, conduct code reviews, and contribute to hiring and capability development.
Required Skills & Experience
- Significant experience in data engineering, including leading teams or major technical initiatives.
- Expert SQL and strong programming skills in Python and/or Scala.
- Cloud data engineering experience (AWS, Azure or GCP), including object storage, compute and managed data services.
- Strong experience with modern data warehousing/lakehouse tools (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks).
- Hands-on orchestration experience (e.g., Airflow, Dagster, Prefect) and CI/CD for data pipelines.
- Experience with streaming and event-driven data (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub) is highly desirable.
- Proficiency with infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation) and containerisation (Docker; Kubernetes beneficial).
- Strong understanding of data quality frameworks, testing (unit/integration), and observability.
- Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, able to translate requirements into technical solutions.
Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics or a related discipline (or equivalent experience).
- Relevant cloud or data certifications are advantageous.
What You’ll Bring
- A pragmatic, delivery-focused mindset with a commitment to high standards.
- Ability to lead by example, coach others and build effective engineering practices.
- Curiosity, accountability and a continuous improvement approach.