Lead Data Engineer
UK – Remote | £110,000–£130,000 + benefits
This is an exciting opportunity to step into a high‑impact Lead Data Engineer role within a fast‑scaling, fully remote tech business. You’ll shape their data engineering function, lead technical direction, and build modern, robust data infrastructure that directly powers real‑time product and commercial decision‑making.
The Company
They are a next‑generation digital platform operating in a fast‑growing consumer market, backed by recent multi‑million Series C investment. Their product is built around best‑in‑class engineering, modern design, and a mission to deliver an intuitive, mobile‑first user experience. With strong year‑on‑year growth, they are now expanding their data function to support scale, performance, and product innovation.
You’ll be joining an engineering‑driven environment where data is central to the product and where technical excellence is genuinely valued.
The Role
As Lead Data Engineer, you will act as both a hands‑on technical expert and a mentor to a growing team. You’ll drive engineering standards, own key architectural decisions, and deliver scalable, reliable pipelines and models.
You will:
* Lead the technical strategy for data engineering across ingestion, modelling, orchestration, and automation.
* Build and maintain high‑quality ETL pipelines using modern tooling and cloud‑native infrastructure.
* Develop robust data models and frameworks to support analytics, reporting, and product teams.
* Champion best practices across testing, version control, monitoring, and CI/CD.
* Collaborate with engineering and data leadership to align technical decisions with broader business strategy.
* Mentor mid‑level and senior engineers, raising the bar on technical capability and engineering quality.
* Influence tooling choices and introduce new technologies to improve reliability and scalability.
Your Skills & Experience
You will be a strong fit if you bring:
Must‑haves
* 7+ years’ experience in data engineering.
* Deep expertise in Python and SQL.
* Strong experience building ETL pipelines and distributed data systems.
* Solid cloud experience — ideally AWS (open to GCP).
* Orchestration experience (Dagster, Airflow, or similar).
* Experience with modern data warehouses such as Snowflake, Redshift, or BigQuery.
* Infrastructure‑as‑code experience (Terraform or Pulumi).
* Strong data modelling capability (dimensional modelling, Data Vault, etc.).
* Background in software engineering or backend development is highly desirable.
* Experience in high‑growth or smaller technology environments.
Nice‑to‑haves
* Snowflake experience.
* Experience with dbt, Fivetran, AWS Glue, or Apache Iceberg.
* Prior leadership or mentoring experience (team lead/tech lead).
What They Offer
* The opportunity to influence architecture, tooling, and engineering standards from day one.
* A pathway into broader leadership as the team expands to 8+ engineers.
* A modern, well‑funded environment where engineering maturity is valued and rewarded.