Data Engineering Lead in London

Novatus Global is a Series B scale-up RegTech SaaS provider and boutique advisory firm, helping financial institutions manage their most complex regulatory requirements. We combine deep consulting expertise with cutting-edge SaaS solutions, enabling clients to strengthen compliance, enhance resilience, and drive sustainable growth. Our flagship SaaS platform, En:ACT, is a market-leading solution for regulatory transaction reporting and reconciliation across global regimes. En:ACT automates reporting, reconciles data across systems, and maps errors directly to regulatory rules, helping firms remediate quickly, reduce risk, and meet regulatory obligations with confidence.

Alongside our SaaS offering, our unique model delivers consulting services across Risk & Compliance, ESG, Strategy, Data, and Operations. Unlike larger consultancies, we embed ourselves within client teams to deliver both insight and execution, taking ownership of outcomes and driving measurable impact. Since our launch in 2019, we have scaled rapidly, creating space for our people to grow with the business. Backed by North American private equity investment, and partnerships with the London Stock Exchange Group and Snowflake’s global data platform, we are shaping the future of regulatory compliance through innovation in both advisory and technology.

As a Data Engineering Lead, you will manage a team of Data Engineers whilst remaining hands-on with delivery and architecture. You'll be providing technical leadership and mentorship to your team, and writing clean, maintainable, and well-tested code. You will be accountable for our configuration-driven data platform in Databricks, enabling non-engineers to define regulatory logic, and our Snowflake data warehouse, ensuring scalability, auditability, and fitness for client-facing regulatory use cases. You will set technical direction, drive standards, and ensure high-quality execution across the team.

You’ll join at a pivotal stage as we modernize our data infrastructure, migrating from Python scripts and MySQL to Databricks and Snowflake. Our systems power regulatory reporting for major financial institutions, requiring precision, traceability, and reliability.

What You'll Do

• Own the architecture, roadmap and delivery for our configuration-driven data framework in Databricks and our Snowflake warehouse.
• Manage and mentor a team of Data Engineers in a player/coach capacity.
• Design, build, and optimize data pipelines using Databricks, Kafka, Python and PySpark.
• Evolve a configuration-driven platform enabling non-engineers to define regulatory logic.
• Ensure pipelines are auditable, lineage-aware, idempotent, and resilient in regulated environments.
• Implement robust data quality controls including testing, validation, monitoring, and alerting.
• Drive performance optimization across Spark and Snowflake workloads.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, DevOps, and Regulatory teams to translate requirements into scalable technical designs.
• Improve engineering standards, processes, and tooling across the data function.

Must-Haves

• Experience leading an Engineering team.
• Experience building data pipelines using Python and PySpark.
• Experience designing auditable, reproducible data pipelines in regulated or high-integrity environments.
• Able to write and optimize complex SQL queries on large data sets.
• Strong data modeling and warehouse design fundamentals.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals (clean code, automated testing, CI/CD, observability).
• Experience with modern cloud data platforms and orchestration tools.
• Ability to translate complex regulatory requirements into technical specifications.
• High ownership mindset and accountability for delivery and reliability.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with Kafka or other event streaming platforms.
• Hands-on experience with AWS cloud infrastructure.
• Experience building new data platforms or modernizing legacy systems.
• FinTech, RegTech, or financial services background.

Perks & Benefits

• Private Medical Insurance (AXA) – includes mental health, dental, vision, and private GP access.
• Life Insurance (4× salary) with Unum.
• Unum’s Help@Hand: includes medical second opinions, physiotherapy, lifestyle coaching, savings and discounts, and cancer support services for you, your partner, and your child(ren).
• Employee Assistance Program.
• Enhanced parental leave (maternity & paternity).
• Professional qualification sponsorship.
• Accelerated career progression based on performance, not tenure.
• Holiday entitlement increases with tenure.
• Flexible hours with core collaboration time.
• Paid volunteering leave.
• Gym & fitness discounts.
• Quarterly socials, and office snacks & drinks.
• Interest-based working groups to collaborate and innovate.

Novatus is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All employment decisions are made based on business needs, role requirements, and individual qualifications, without regard to race, age, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, socioeconomic background, disability, or any other characteristic protected under the Equality Act 2010. We maintain a workplace culture that is inclusive, respectful, and supportive. Our recruitment and selection processes are designed to ensure fairness and consistency for all candidates. Reasonable adjustments are available throughout the application and interview process, and candidates are encouraged to contact Human Resources to discuss any specific requirements. This commitment is embedded in all aspects of our employment practices, including recruitment, compensation, professional development, promotion, and workplace conduct.