Tech Lead - Data Engineering

Data Engineering Lead
Salary up to £110,000
London 3 days per week in office

Overview
A fast growing technology company is investing heavily in its data platform as it scales its products and machine learning capabilities. The business operates a high volume, transactional platform where data is central to product development, automation, and decision making.
This is an opportunity to take technical ownership of a modern data platform, shaping how data is ingested, modelled, transformed, and consumed across the organisation. The environment values strong software engineering, pragmatic architecture, and hands on ownership of production systems.

The Role
We are hiring a Data Engineering Lead to act as the senior technical authority for the data platform. Reporting into senior engineering leadership, you will define the end to end technical direction of the data ecosystem while remaining a hands on individual contributor.
This role sits at the intersection of data engineering, platform architecture, and system design. You will be responsible for building durable, scalable data systems that support analytics, operational reporting, and machine learning driven product features.
Rather than focusing purely on pipelines, this role is about designing long lived data systems that are reliable, observable, and fit for long term use.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the data platform end to end, including ingestion, storage, transformation, and consumption layers
• Lead the design of distributed data systems integrating backend services, external APIs, event streams, and data stores
• Partner with product and engineering teams to design data foundations for machine learning powered features in production
• Act as the lead architect for data models and data contracts across structured and unstructured data
• Set and uphold engineering standards, including documentation, architecture diagrams, and Architecture Decision Records
• Design and build scalable, fault tolerant ETL and ELT pipelines with clear trade offs around latency, freshness, and cost
• Remain hands on, building and maintaining core pipelines, schemas, and services in production
• Define the technical roadmap for data and provide mentorship through code reviews and technical guidance
• Design and implement workflow automation to reduce manual operational processes
• Establish governance frameworks covering access control, lineage, observability, and data quality
• Take ownership of production incidents, data quality issues, and platform cost management

Experience and Background

• Experience as a Tech Lead, Principal Engineer, or senior Data Engineer owning complex, distributed systems
• Strong software engineering background with deep experience in Python and production grade practices
• Experience enabling machine learning systems in production environments rather than purely research use cases
• Advanced SQL skills and experience with modern cloud data warehouses
• Experience designing and operating data pipelines using tools such as dbt, Airflow, or similar frameworks
• Strong experience with Git based workflows, CI CD, automated testing, and operating long lived systems
• Proven ability to make sound architectural decisions balancing correctness, performance, and cost
• Strong analytical skills and the ability to interrogate data directly

Nice to Have

• Experience with BI tools like Looker
• Experience building internal data platforms that enable analytics teams
• Exposure to workflow automation tools
• Experience designing systems handling text, documents, images, or other non tabular data

Benefits

• Salary up to £110,000
• Hybrid working with 3 days per week in the London office
• Competitive holiday allowance
• Private healthcare and wellbeing benefits
• Enhanced parental leave
• Pension scheme and life insurance
• Learning and development budget
• Company social events and team activities
• Office perks including food and refreshments