Senior GCP Data Engineer

Homeprotect was founded on a simple principle - to provide protection to people underserved by the home insurance industry. Since 2002, we've been combining smart technology with real human expertise to protect hundreds of thousands of unique homes across the UK. If you're someone who loves solving interesting problems, taking ownership and working with a team that aims high, speaks up and lifts each other, Homeprotect is a place where you can do meaningful work, grow your career and make a real difference for our customers.

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do our people. We're a small but perfectly formed team of insurance specialists, technologists, data scientists and customer champions - all bringing individual expertise, an appetite for innovation and a shared ambition to protect the homes and things people love. We work at pace, but we trust our people to work in a way that brings out their best. You'll collaborate closely across teams, have real ownership from day one and see the impact you have first-hand with flexible working to help you balance the needs of your role with the rhythm of your life.

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 senior engineer who can help architect and deliver a best-in-class platform from the ground up, with a strong focus on production‑grade GCP engineering, dbt, and dimensional modelling. You will report to the Head of Data Engineering and work closely with the data engineering and platform teams to deliver reliable ingestion patterns, maintainable dbt transformations, and well‑designed dimensional marts that enable business insight.

• Delivery across the data lifecycle: Deliver end-to-end data products on GCP, from onboarding new sources through to curated datasets, marts, and business-facing outputs.
• Build and operate ingestion pipelines using appropriate patterns (CDC, APIs, SFTP, streaming), ensuring reliability, scalability, and operational simplicity.
• Build and improve transformation workflows in the warehouse using dbt, with a strong focus on correctness, performance, and cost control.
• Design and implement dimensional models that are fit for analytics at scale, including facts, dimensions, explicit grain definition, and star schema design.
• Translate business requirements into clear dimensional designs and dbt models, validating outputs with stakeholders and iterating quickly.
• 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.
• Contribute to operational tooling (logging, alerting, runbooks, dashboards) so the team can rapidly detect issues and restore service.

• 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.
• Deep, hands‑on dbt expertise in production, including designing layered projects (staging, intermediate, marts), implementing robust testing and documentation, and operating patterns such as incremental models, handling schema changes safely and managing late‑arriving data and backfills without breaking downstream marts.
• Strong dimensional modelling expertise, including declaring and enforcing grain as a design contract, delivering fact and dimension tables with conformed dimensions, and handling real‑world complexity such as slowly changing dimensions (Type 1 and Type 2), late‑arriving facts, and maintaining consistent business definitions across marts over time.
• Strong ability to design and implement reliable data pipelines and make good engineering trade‑offs.
• Strong hands‑on experience with BigQuery, Cloud Storage (GCS), Cloud Run/Functions, 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 delivery.

• GCP certification (Professional Data Engineer or similar).
• Hands‑on experience with Terraform, Kafka, Dataflow, Pub/Sub.
• Experience in regulated domains (insurance, finance, etc).

• Learning and Growth: We invest in your development through structured learning, mentoring, buddying, on‑the‑job experience and cross‑functional projects.
• Health and Wellbeing: Your wellbeing matters here. We offer private healthcare through BUPA, an Employee Assistance Programme covering legal, financial and counselling support for you, a Wellbeing Centre with online tools and resources, regular wellbeing seminars and workshops, annual flu jabs and an annual eye care voucher.
• Financial Security and Reward: We offer an annual discretionary bonus scheme up to 30% of your base pay, life insurance at four times your salary, and a pension with Aegon.
• Time Off: 25 days’ annual leave plus bank holidays, with the option to buy or sell up to five additional days each year.
• Genuine Flexible Working: We trust our people to work in a way that best suits them - with flexible working to balance the needs of your role with the rhythm of your life.
• Purpose and Community: We care about more than just the work. Through our charity partnership with Refuge, the UK's largest specialist domestic abuse charity and regular social, wellbeing and charitable events throughout the year, there are plenty of ways to connect, give back and feel part of something bigger.

We're proud to be an equal opportunity employer and actively encourage applications from all backgrounds. We believe in celebrating difference - everything that makes both our customers and our people unique.