Data Engineering Lead in London

We’re looking for a technical, high-ownership Data Engineering Lead who can ship, operate and improve production systems — and translate platform work into real product and customer outcomes.

Requirements:

• Hands-on Data Engineering Leader: You’ve owned production data platforms end-to-end and can lead technical direction without stepping away from the code.
• Dagster expertise: Demonstrable experience building asset-based orchestration (assets, sensors, IO managers, resources) in production.
• Warehouse & SQL depth: Advanced BigQuery skills — partitioning, clustering, materialised views, slot/cost management and query optimisation.
• Ingestion reality: You’ve operated Airbyte or similar, built resilient API/FTP/SFTP ingestion patterns, and handled rate limits, pagination, partial failures and schema evolution.
• Production API & feeds experience: You’ve shipped customer-consumable APIs or feeds (SLAs/contracts, monitoring, provenance) and can design stable downstream contracts and rollout plans.
• Python & engineering rigor: You write clean, testable Python (typing/pydantic where appropriate), author unit and integration tests, and enforce CI and linting standards.
• Multi-cloud & IaC: Comfortable with AWS (ECS/Fargate, RDS, S3) and GCP (BigQuery, GCS), and production Terraform experience.
• Operational excellence: You’ve built observability, incident response, runbooks and reduced on-call toil through automation and better design.
• Clear communicator & coach: You can explain trade-offs simply, unblock teams fast, and raise engineering quality through calm, direct leadership.

If you’re excited about this role but your experience doesn’t perfectly align with the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway.

What the job involves:

• As our Data Engineering Lead, you’ll own the technical roadmap for our data platform and raise the bar on reliability, scalability, and engineering quality. This is a hands‑on, player/coach role.
• Own the Data Platform Roadmap: Set technical direction and deliver the highest‑leverage platform improvements across reliability, cost, developer experience, and scale. You’ll choose, prioritise and deliver the next 12 months of platform work.
• Deliver customer‑facing APIs & Feeds: Support the design and delivery of API‑backed feeds and enrichment pipelines that become product features and revenue streams.
• Level Up Orchestration in Dagster: Build and refine asset‑based pipelines, sensors, schedules, backfills, IO managers and monitoring patterns that are robust, idempotent and easy to operate. Define standard patterns for incremental jobs, full refreshes and reverse ETL.
• Make ingestion boring (in the best way): Improve and scale ingestion across Airbyte OSS and DLT: handle schema drift, connector health, rate limits, retries, checkpointing and operational resilience so pipelines run without heroics.
• Strengthen BigQuery foundations: Own and evolve our best practices, partitioning & clustering strategy, slot/cost management and query performance guardrails.
• Raise data quality & observability: Implement freshness SLOs, automated checks, validation, provenance and alerting so the business and customers can trust the data. Ship runbooks, incident playbooks and automated remediation where possible.
• Enable customer pipelines & reverse ETL: Own correctness, availability and SLAs for customer‑facing workflows, including schema contracts and safe rollouts.
• Infrastructure as Code & CI: Own Terraform modules, CI/CD flows for both infra and data code, and deployment safety gates that prevent costly mistakes.
• Coach and grow the team: Line-manage and mentor engineers, raise standards through code reviews and testing, and build a high‑performance engineering culture that values operational excellence.