Lead Data Engineer (Azure) in Manchester

About the Company

We are partnering with a fast-growing SaaS company to hire a Lead Data Engineer who will help shape and scale their next-generation data and analytics platform.

About the Role

This role sits within a modern data function where engineering, analytics, and product work closely together. The Lead Data Engineer will guide a small team, own the full data lifecycle, and deliver trusted, high-performance data products that support customers and internal stakeholders. It\’s a hands-on leadership role with strong technical influence — ideal for someone who enjoys building scalable pipelines, improving data quality, and shaping the direction of a growing platform.

Responsibilities

• Leading a small team of data engineers and analysts to design, build, and maintain scalable data solutions.
• Owning the end-to-end data lifecycle — from ingestion and transformation through to analytics and data product delivery.
• Architecting and operating pipelines using Databricks, Spark, and Delta Lake, ensuring performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency.
• Working closely with BI developers and analysts to deliver dashboards, extracts, datasets, and APIs that power customer insights.
• Shaping platform architecture and setting technical direction for data engineering best practices.
• Driving improvements in data quality, lineage, governance, and observability.
• Playing a key role in data DevOps, CI/CD, testing, and cloud operations.
• Partnering with product and engineering teams to align work with the platform roadmap.
• Overseeing operational monitoring and support for the data platform.
• Promoting a learning culture in the team and encouraging experimentation with new tools and approaches.
• Mentoring team members and supporting their development.

Qualifications

• Experience leading or mentoring data engineering teams within a SaaS or product-led environment.
• Deep hands-on knowledge of Databricks, Apache Spark, and Delta Lake, including large-scale or near real-time workloads.
• Strong proficiency in Python, SQL, and cloud data services (Azure preferred, but any major cloud is fine).
• Experience designing and operating end-to-end data and analytics architectures.
• Good understanding of BI tooling (e.g. Power BI, Tableau) and analytics modelling.
• Strong grasp of ETL/ELT orchestration, data quality frameworks, and observability tooling.
• Familiarity with governance practices including lineage, cataloguing, and data integrity standards.
• Awareness of data security, access controls, and compliance considerations.
• Experience with CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and cost-optimised cloud engineering.
• Confident communicator, comfortable working with both technical and non-technical teams.
• Naturally curious and motivated by delivering new insights and data products using modern tooling.

Why This Role?

• Chance to lead and grow a talented team while remaining hands-on technically.
• Ownership of a modern data platform with strong influence on architecture and future direction.
• Opportunity to deliver customer-facing data products with real business impact.
• Collaborative environment with the freedom to innovate and use emerging technologies.