Lead Data Engineer

About the Role

This is a hands-on leadership role with responsibility for the technical direction of the Data Engineering function and the design, delivery and governance of the data platform. You will remain close to the engineering work: designing solutions, reviewing architecture and code, improving the platform, and helping the team deliver reliable, scalable data products. Alongside this, you will mentor engineers and work closely with stakeholders across the business to translate data requirements into practical solutions.

About the Company

Our client is an recruitment tech business investing in its technology, data and people to support its next phase of growth. They are looking for an experienced Lead Data Engineer to lead the development, reliability and evolution of their data engineering capability.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the technical strategy for the AWS-based data platform and Data Engineering function.
• Lead the design and delivery of scalable, reliable and cost-effective data solutions.
• Build and optimise modern batch and real-time data pipelines to support business growth.
• Own and evolve the data architecture, ensuring scalability, performance and maintainability.
• Champion engineering best practices, including code reviews, technical standards and architectural governance.
• Develop robust data models and datasets that power reporting, analytics, product insights and machine learning.
• Drive improvements in data quality, observability, monitoring and platform reliability.
• Lead the adoption of Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD and automation across the data platform.
• Work closely with analysts, data scientists and business stakeholders to turn data requirements into impactful solutions.
• Evaluate and implement new technologies, including AWS AI services, to enhance platform capabilities.
• Lead incident resolution, root cause analysis and continuous improvement initiatives.
• Mentor and develop a team of Data Engineers, encouraging technical excellence, ownership and collaboration.

Requirements

• Strong commercial experience in Data Engineering, with experience leading or mentoring engineers.
• Strong experience designing and building cloud-based data platforms, ideally on AWS.
• Excellent SQL skills and strong experience with analytical data modelling.
• Strong hands-on experience with dbt in a production environment.
• Experience building and operating production-grade data pipelines.
• Strong Python development skills.
• Experience with data warehouses such as Amazon Redshift.
• Experience with orchestration technologies such as Apache Airflow.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code, ideally Terraform.
• Good understanding of CI/CD and modern software engineering practices.
• Experience working with both batch and event-driven or streaming data.
• Strong understanding of data quality, monitoring, observability and operational reliability.
• Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• A pragmatic approach to engineering: knowing when to build, when to improve and when to keep things simple.

Logistics

• This is a remote role, with infrequent travel to meet up with the team.
• Pay range £80,000 - £90,000

Interested? We’d love to hear from you.

You don’t need to tick every box to apply. If you bring strong data engineering experience and this opportunity excites you, please get in touch, even if your experience doesn’t match every requirement. We welcome applications from all backgrounds and particularly encourage women and people from groups underrepresented in technology to apply.