Lead GCP Data Engineer

About Homeprotect

We founded Homeprotect on a simple principle - to provide protection to people underserved by the home insurance industry. We are experts at insuring people who want to build or buy a unique property, renovate, rent a home or leave it unoccupied. Our smart tech enables our customers to get an instant, online quote to cover a huge range of complex needs and our UK customer support teams are on hand to provide information and support when only a real person will do. Our insurance has already empowered hundreds of thousands of people to protect their homes and the things they love.

What It's Like To Work Here

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do our people. We are a small but perfectly formed team, made up of insurance industry specialists alongside a diverse mix of technologists, data scientists and customer and marketing champions from all sorts of industries and backgrounds. We all bring our individual expertise, an appetite for innovation and a shared ambition to empower people to protect their homes and the things that they love. Working in a fast-paced environment where change happens regularly is how we do things. We also recognise that you'll do your best work when you have the right balance, which is why we've fully embraced hybrid working, giving our teams the flexibility to choose the right location and working hours for them. We focus on the outputs of work, not where it's completed, with an expectation that colleagues spend around one day a week in the office (or a minimum of four days per month) to connect and collaborate. There will be times when getting together in one location makes sense, but day to day, our teams have the freedom to decide where to work, and we trust them to balance business needs with their own preferences. We have been recognised externally as a Great Place to Work for the last six consecutive years.

This role leads the design and operation of a modern, integrated data governance strategy that ensures our data is trusted, compliant, and well documented across Homeprotect. As part of the Data team, you will set and implement the standards, policies, and frameworks that underpin our analytics, ML, and AI roadmap, while fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making. You will work closely with Data Engineering and business stakeholders to define clear data ownership and stewardship, enable responsible access to data, and elevate data literacy across the organisation. The role combines strategic leadership with hands-on delivery. Please note: this role is hybrid, with a requirement to be in our office in New Malden, south-west London, a minimum of 1 day per week.

Role Summary

This is a unique opportunity to join HomeProtect at the start of building a brand new GCP Data Analytics Platform. We are looking for an enthusiastic, experienced lead engineer who can help drive, architect, and deliver a best-in-class platform from the ground up. You will report directly to the Head of Data Engineering and provide technical leadership across the data engineering team, helping to shape design decisions, set engineering standards, and ensure delivery remains aligned to our platform direction.

What You Will Do

• Technical leadership

• Shape implementation choices and guide the team through trade-offs (cost, reliability, security, operability, maintainability)
• Set and maintain engineering standards (patterns, templates, coding practices, testing expectations, documentation)
• Create technical clarity through lightweight design notes and ADRs that help the team move faster with fewer surprises

• Lead end-to-end delivery of data products on GCP, from onboarding new sources through to curated datasets, marts, and business-facing outputs
• Own ingestion design and implementation at a platform level: selecting and refining patterns, establishing reusable templates, and ensuring ingestion is reliable, scalable, and easy to operate
• Build and improve transformation and modelling workflows in the warehouse, with a strong focus on correctness, performance, and cost control
• Work in an Agile way: contribute to planning, estimation, delivery cadence, and continuous improvement
• Maintain a strong focus on delivering measurable value to stakeholders, prioritising work that improves decision making and accelerates insights aligned with business needs

• Design pipelines and jobs to be production-grade: idempotent, observable, resilient to failure, and easy to support
• Champion automated testing and release practices so changes can be safely promoted through environments with minimal manual effort

• Mentor and upskill data engineers through pairing, structured reviews, knowledge sharing, and best practice guidance
• Be a go-to technical reference for the team, providing calm, high-quality support when work is ambiguous or high pressure

Requirements

We would love to hear from people with the following skills and experience:

• Essential

• 5+ years' experience as a Data Engineer, including building and operating production-grade data pipelines and data products
• 3+ years building on GCP in a production environment
• Strong ability to design and implement reliable data pipelines and make good engineering trade-offs
• Strong hands-on experience with: BigQuery, Cloud Storage (GCS), Terraform, dbt, Kafka (and streaming data concepts), Dataflow, Cloud Run (jobs and or services), Cloud Composer (Airflow) or equivalent orchestration tooling
• Experience designing and operating pipelines across multiple ingestion patterns, including CDC, APIs, SFTP, streaming etc
• Strong understanding of medallion architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold) and how to implement it in a modern analytics platform
• Strong experience working within Agile methodologies (Scrum) and contributing positively to team rituals and delivery cadence
• Strong communication: you can explain technical decisions clearly to engineers and non-engineers, and you document just enough to scale the team

• GCP certification (Professional Data Engineer or similar)
• Experience in regulated domains (insurance, finance)

What Success Looks Like (first 90 Days)

• You are successfully ingesting new data sources using a combination of existing and newly developed ingestion patterns (CDC, APIs, SFTP, streaming), and improving those patterns as you go
• You are building out new dbt warehouse models with strong engineering discipline, helping establish repeatable standards for the team
• You are working directly with the business to understand new dimensional models and marts required, translating needs into clear modelling approaches and deliverable data products

Benefits

We think we have a fantastic company culture and welcome new team members with open arms. We also offer a great range of benefits, including:

• A genuinely flexible approach to work.
• Opportunities to focus on your professional growth whether that's through training or other personal development opportunities.
• Discount of 50% and 15% for friends and family when you choose to take out a home insurance policy with us.
• An in-house wellbeing programme including seminars and workshops from wellbeing coaches and professionals.
• Home working starter kit and money to spend on additional equipment you may need.
• Charitable giving scheme, so you can donate to our partner charity, or one of your choices.
• The opportunity to work alongside brilliant people.
• 25 days' holiday (plus bank holidays) and the ability to buy and sell >5 days annually.
• Private medical cover for all employees.
• Life insurance.
• Annual discretionary bonus scheme.
• Pension contribution.
• Free fruit and really good coffee for the days you come into the office.
• Local and national retail discounts.

Unique As Standard

We're proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and actively encourage applications from all backgrounds, as long as you meet the knowledge, skills and experience criteria for the role and have the right to work in the UK. We believe in celebrating difference, and everything that makes both our customers and people unique, by creating an environment where everyone can thrive.

We encourage you to let us know if you need any extra help with your application, or if you have any requirements at any stage of the recruitment journey.