Lead Data Engineer

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.