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’re experts at insuring people who want to build or buy a unique property, renovate, rent a home or leave it unoccupied. We can cover people who travel a lot, run a business from home or even collect rare treasures. We protect people who love living in a listed building, having a view of a river or sunbathing on a flat roof. We can do this because 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. But we’re not content with being the leading provider of what’s called ‘non-standard’ insurance. We believe there’s no such thing as ‘standard’. We’re all unique and we all deserve home insurance designed with our individual needs in mind – something our combination of real people and smart tech enables us to do. Our simple promise? Whoever you are and wherever you live, with Homeprotect we’ve got you covered.

What It’s Like To Work Here
Our customers come from all walks of life and so do our people. We’re 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. But 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. Most companies think their culture is great, however at Homeprotect, we have the proof to back this up. We have been recognised externally as a Great Place to Work for the last six consecutive years.

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.
• Delivery across the data lifecycle
  • 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.
• Operational excellence and quality
  • 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.
• Team enablement
  • 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.

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.
• Nice to have
  • 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.

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. We are really supportive of you flexing your hours and location to help you keep everything in your life in balance.
• Opportunities to focus on your professional growth whether that’s through training or other personal development opportunities - we want you to build your long-term career with us.
• 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, because this isn’t something that every organisation can offer!

On top of that, we also offer all the standard stuff, like:

• 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.

Have we captured your imagination? If so, we’d love to hear from you!

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 think everyone can excel in the right environment – no matter your gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, disabilities or beliefs. 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. Equally, lots of our staff at Homeprotect work flexibly and in a variety of ways, whether that’s different core hours or remote working. Please chat to us at your application or interview stage about the flexibility you need, as we’re always happy to explore what’s possible for the role.