Data Lead

LendInvest is the UK’s leading FinTech platform for property finance. Over the past 17 years, we have grown from just our two founders to a team of over 200 working to make property finance simple for everyone. A workplace culture built around trying new things, getting things done, and having fun while we do it has helped us lend more than £7.5 billion of mortgages, put thousands of new or improved homes into the UK housing market, and successfully launch on the London Stock Exchange. We have big plans to continue growing the business, our products, our technology, and our people.

About Your Work

Reporting to the Head of Engineering, this is a critical “doer‑leader” position focused on stabilising and remediating our data foundations while shaping our long‑term data strategy. This role is ideally suited to a current Senior or Lead Data Engineer ready to take on team leadership or an existing Data Team Lead looking for a new challenge. You will begin as a hands‑on technical lead, with a clear path to owning the data platform and building and leading the team around it. You will inherit a complex architectural landscape and play a key technical role working alongside our architecture team for our 2026 Data Transformation Programme. Initially, you will own technical direction, challenging external partners where required to remediate legacy ingestion issues. Following the initial transformation phase, you will take full ownership of the platform, ensuring data integrity and improving confidence in data‑driven decision making across the business.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner with external delivery specialists to troubleshoot and resolve ‘inherited’ ingestion failures and silent data mutations.
• Take responsibility for a complex data ecosystem, addressing legacy ingestion patterns while incrementally building towards a more scalable, maintainable, and well‑architected platform.
• Automate manual data reconciliations and implement robust observability, testing, and validation frameworks to detect silent data issues, enforce data integrity, and improve trust in our pipelines.
• Manage the transition from partner‑led delivery to a sustainable internal ‘run’ model, ensuring knowledge is fully transferred, documented, and embedded within the team.
• Build and scale a new internal data engineering function (initially hiring 1‑2 engineers), reducing reliance on external partners.
• Establish engineering standards and challenge existing practices where necessary, and upskill Data Analysts to ensure insights are built on a governed, high‑trust data foundation.

About you

• Expertise in Python (or similar) and advanced SQL, with experience building and maintaining reliable, well‑structured data pipelines and transformation layers.
• Hands‑on experience designing and operating cloud‑based data platforms (e.g. AWS + modern warehouse), including orchestration, storage, and compute.
• Lead by example, setting engineering standards, mentoring others, and helping build a high‑performing data engineering capability.
• Experience applying testing, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and version control to data platforms to ensure reliability and maintainability.
• Track record of implementing data validation, observability, and lineage to improve data trust and transparency.
• Comfortable working with existing platforms, identifying root causes of instability or inefficiency, and incrementally improving them.
• Able to work closely with analysts, product, and engineering teams to align data solutions with business needs.

Benefits