Lead Data Engineer

Role Overview

• WORKING PATTERN: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week, or 40% of our time, at one of our office sites.

Colleagues with disabilities can be supported with workplace adjustments including hybrid working expectations in line with our Flexibility Works policy

• We’re looking for a Lead Data Engineer to shape and lead the lab’s data engineering capability
• This is a senior role combining deep technical expertise with leadership, influencing direction and delivering high-impact outcomes across a complex enterprise environment
• You’ll operate at the intersection of data engineering, security and AI, defining and driving the data engineering strategy and roadmap, owning scalable data pipelines, embedding secure‑by‑design principles, and enabling production‑grade data foundations for AI, machine learning and advanced analytics
• You’ll also partner across Security, Cloud, Architecture and Product teams while mentoring engineers and building a high‑performing engineering culture

Benefits

• A generous holiday allowance: You’ll be eligible for a minimum of 22 days holiday (excluding bank holidays), rising to 30 days based on length of service and grade.
• A flexible way of working: Whether you want flexibility over your location or when you log on, together we can create an approach that works for you and for the business.
• Family leave: Up to 63 weeks of maternity or adoption leave.

Statutory maternity or adoption pay is available for 39 weeks, and 20 weeks will be enhanced to the equivalent of full pay.

Partners can have six weeks of fully paid paternity leave.

• Flex cash: This is 4% of your basic salary and can be used to spend on the benefits of your choice, or you can choose to take it as a cash top up in your monthly salary.
• Health insurance: Our company funded Private Medical Benefit provides all colleagues with access to good quality medical care, including accommodation, nursing care and specialist advice.
• Colleague

Offers: Get discounts on everything from electrical items to cinema tickets and weekly food shopping.

You can share this benefit with up to ten family members or friends.

• Financial products: Take advantage of our great financial products, some at a discounted rate, including current accounts, home and car insurance and loans.
• Share plans: Participate in Sharematch and receive matching shares of up to £45 a month from the company, and you can choose to participate in Sharesave, our combined savings and share option plan.
• Pension: We offer a generous pension plan, with all joiners being automatically enrolled in our ‘Your Tomorrow’ scheme.

You can decide how much you save and get a say in where your contributions are invested.

Qualifications

• Experience with cloud-native data platforms across Azure, AWS, GCP or similar enterprise environments
• Ability to make pragmatic, risk‑aware technical decisions balancing resilience, pace and long‑term maintainability
• Proven experience leading technical delivery and mentoring engineers in a senior or lead capacity
• Experience embedding engineering best practices such as CI/CD, automated testing, observability and version control
• Strong collaboration skills, working across engineering, security, data science and product teams
• Strong experience designing, building and operating scalable data platforms and pipelines in complex environments
• Deep understanding of data modelling, data quality, metadata, lineage and governance principles
• Exposure to MLOps or SMLOps tooling and model lifecycle management
• Experience supporting AI/ML pipelines, feature engineering or analytics platforms
• Experience working in security‑focused or regulated environments
• Knowledge of AI governance and secure adoption of generative or agentic AI
• Familiarity with event‑driven or streaming data architectures
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