Staff Data Engineer

Ready to shape the future of data at Policy Expert? At Policy Expert, data underpins everything we do. We use it to drive our pricing, optimise customer journeys, meet regulatory obligations, and unlock new value across Home, Motor and Pet insurance for over 1.5 million customers. We’re nearing the end of a major phase in our data transformation: building a cloud‑native Data & Analytics Platform in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and moving away from a legacy, siloed AWS estate. This platform lays the foundations for something much bigger – trusted data, data products at scale, and advanced analytics and AI embedded across the business.

We’re looking for a Staff Data Engineer to play a pivotal role in this journey: a senior technical leader who thrives on complexity, enjoys working across teams, and wants to influence how data platforms are built, evolved, and used at scale. This is a rare opportunity to shape a modern data estate through build to long‑term value creation, while working closely with senior leadership in a high‑trust, low‑ego engineering culture.

The Role

As Staff Data Engineer, you will be the most senior individual contributor within our Data Engineering chapter and a trusted technical partner to the Head of Data Engineering. Rather than owning a single team, you’ll operate across the chapter spanning data platform operations, integration and warehousing, helping us tackle our hardest technical problems and ensuring that the platforms we’ve built continue to scale, evolve, and deliver value. You’ll shape decisions, guide teams, and bring clarity where things are complex or ambiguous – without becoming a bottleneck or a gatekeeper.

What you’ll be doing

• Shaping the next phase of data: Help define what “engineering excellence” looks like post‑transformation, ensuring reliability, operability, cost control, and ease of use. You will evolve architecture and patterns as new use cases, data volumes, and consumers emerge, ensuring the platform remains adaptable to change.
• Owning complex cross‑cutting problems: You will lead and support initiatives that cut across teams and bring structure and momentum to technically ambiguous work.
• Raising the technical bar (without slowing team down): You’ll shape and evolve our data engineering architecture, patterns, and standards. Guiding architectural decisions through design reviews, RFCs, and informal coaching, and helping teams make pragmatic trade‑offs between speed, quality, and long‑term sustainability.
• Being a force multiplier: You’ll mentor senior engineers and advise technical leads. You’ll be transparent with your context and intentions to empower teams to make decisions locally, saving escalation for when it’s really needed.
• Partnering across the organisation: You’ll be an advocate for the platform across the business, comfortable communicating our strategy and supporting opportunities to create value. You’ll ensure we have alignment with our wider Technology engineering group where appropriate. You will work closely with Data Science to ensure data platforms support advanced analytics and machine learning, and you’ll collaborate with Data Management and a future Enterprise Data Architect to ensure that governance and engineering reinforce each other.

Our data technology landscape

You don’t need to be an expert in everything, but you should be comfortable navigating and shaping systems like these:

• Data Platform & Warehousing: BigQuery, medallion architecture (Bronze/Silver/Gold), dbt
• Data Integration: Batch and streaming ingestion patterns
• Engineering Practices: Terraform, GitHub Actions, CI/CD, observability, data quality and lineage
• Analytics & ML Enablement: data pipelines and feature engineering supporting ML and advanced analytics

What we’re looking for

We’re looking for someone who combines deep engineering experience with the ability to lead through influence:

• Significant experience building and evolving data engineering systems at scale
• Strong cloud experience with an emphasis on data technologies (GCP preferred; AWS experience a plus)
• Proven ability to operate across multiple teams and domains
• Excellent system‑level thinking – you see second‑ and third‑order effects
• Experience working in regulated environments (e.g. GDPR, Consumer Duty)
• A pragmatic mindset: you know when to push for excellence and when “good enough” really is
• Strong communication skills and the confidence to challenge constructively

Why Policy Expert?

This is a role for a senior engineer who wants to shape how data engineering is done – not just write code, but influence systems, teams, and outcomes at scale. This is a genuine opportunity to create a modern data platform – not just maintain one – in a high trust, low bureaucracy engineering culture.

This role will be based in our London office in a 50/50 Hybrid mode.

We match your pension contributions up to 7%

Learning budget of £1,000 a year + Study leave (with encouragement to use it)

Enhanced maternity & paternity

Travel season ticket loan

Access to a wide selection of London O2 events and use of a Private Lounge

What We Stand for and Next Steps

We pride ourselves on being an equal opportunity employer. We treat all applications equally and recruit based solely on an individual’s skills, knowledge, and experience. The quality and growing diversity of our team is a testament to this commitment. At Policy Expert, we are committed to fostering an inclusive and supportive environment for all candidates. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the interview process to accommodate your needs, please do not hesitate to let us know. We are dedicated to ensuring every candidate has an equal opportunity to succeed and will work with you to provide the necessary support. We aim to be in touch within 14 working days of your application – you will be notified if successful or unsuccessful. Please be encouraged to apply even if you do not meet all the requirements.

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