Head of Data Engineering

Company Background

OAK Global is a leading risk partner, embracing the global reach afforded through operating in the Lloyd’s market. Underwriting through Lloyd’s Syndicates 2843 and 1440.

Headquartered in London, OAK Global operates across key global markets, addressing complex risks with expertise across diverse industries. The company prides itself on fostering trusted partnerships, leveraging advanced analytics and underwriting expertise, and maintaining financial stability.

OAK Global is shaping the future of (re)insurance with innovation, reliability, and a forward-looking vision.

About the Role:

OAK Global offers a rare opportunity to work within a true greenfield environment. Free from legacy systems, complex migrations, or transformation constraints, we are building a modern, best-in-class technology architecture designed to deliver exceptional business value from day one.

This role offers the opportunity to lead the build and implementation of OAK’s Data Platform from the ground up within a small multidisciplinary team of actuaries, data scientists, AI engineers and platform engineers. The platform will integrate a wide range of internal and external datasets to support capital and risk analytics, complex modelling workflows and proprietary applications across the business.

The platform is being built in AWS using modern data engineering practices and cloud-native infrastructure.

This is a senior contributor role focused on platform development. As the first engineer on OAK Global’s Data Platform, you will play a key role in shaping the architecture, tooling and engineering standards that underpin it.

Key Responsibilities:

Data Platform Ownership & Architecture

• Play a central role in the design and evolution of OAK’s Data Platform
• Lead the build and implementation of key data platform components including pipeline frameworks, data models and shared libraries
• Set standards for quality, reliability and maintainability
• Design schemas and storage structures across different layers of the platform

Data Engineering & Delivery

• Translate platform architecture and requirements into robust, scalable implementations
• Design and implement data ingestion and transformation pipelines combining fragmented datasets including exposure data, modelling outputs, internal analytics and unstructured information
• Build shared libraries to ensure consistent data access across applications
• Contribute to datasets supporting AI and modelling workflows across OCEAN

Data Governance, Quality & Reliability

• Define data definitions and calculation logic for core datasets
• Design and implement a data catalogue and metadata framework
• Implement data reliability practices including validation, testing and monitoring
• Ensure pipelines meet requirements around auditability, consistency and reproducibility

Collaboration & Engineering Excellence

• Collaborate with Capital & Risk, Underwriting and Finance & Operations teams to ensure data is reliable and well-defined
• Work closely with the Head of Data & Integration to establish and uphold best-practice engineering standards across the platform including CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code and automated testing
• Provide technical guidance and mentorship to engineers and analysts working with data

What We’re Looking For:

Experience & Attributes:

• Lead data engineering experience (Lead/Staff Data Engineer or similar)
• Experience working across ingestion, transformation, storage and consumption layers and track record building production ETL pipelines in AWS
• Experience designing and contributing to data platform architecture
• BSc/MSc in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Technical Skills:

• Programming
  • Python
  • SQL
  • Familiarity with data processing libraries such as Polars, Pandas, Dask or PyArrow
• AWS Data Platform
  • S3
  • Glue
  • Lambda
  • ECS
  • DynamoDB
  • Redshift or similar analytical databases
• Data Engineering
  • ETL / ELT pipeline design
  • Data modelling and schema design
  • Working with APIs and external data providers
  • Data validation and monitoring
• Software Engineering
  • Git / GitHub
  • CI/CD pipelines
  • Infrastructure-as-code
  • Strong understanding of modern software engineering and cloud infrastructure concepts
• Experience with open table formats (Iceberg, Delta Lake or similar) would be advantageous.

What You’ll Build:

• A cloud-native data platform on AWS
• Scalable data ingestion and transformation pipelines integrating internal systems, vendor models, APIs and unstructured data
• Canonical data models and definitions used across analytics and AI workflows
• Shared data access libraries and platform components
• A data catalogue and metadata framework describing core datasets and lineage
• Reliable pipelines with strong validation, monitoring and traceability

Why Join OAK Global?

Join a culture that values Creativity, Excellence, Determination, Authenticity, and Respect.

You’ll work closely with industry-leading talent, shape OAK Global’s technology direction, and directly enable the company’s strategic growth.