Lead Data Engineer / Fintech in City of London

We are at Synechron, we believe in the power of digital to transform businesses for the better. Our global consulting firm combines creativity and innovative technology to deliver industry-leading digital solutions. Synechron’s progressive technologies and optimization strategies span end-to-end Artificial Intelligence, Consulting, Digital, Cloud & DevOps, Data, and Software Engineering, servicing an array of noteworthy financial services and technology firms. Through research and development initiatives in our FinLabs, we develop solutions for modernization, from Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain to Data Science models, Digital Underwriting, mobile-first applications and more. Over the last 20+ years, our company has been honoured with multiple employer awards, recognizing our commitment to our talented teams. With top clients to boast about, Synechron has a global workforce of 16,500+, and has 60 offices in 20 countries within key global markets.

We are looking for Engineering Tech Leads with strong expertise in Data Engineering, OpenShift Telemetry, Kafka, Splunk, and LLM‑based observability. This role will lead the design and build of enterprise‑scale telemetry and observability platforms.

• Design, build, and optimize large‑scale OpenShift telemetry pipelines (metrics, logs, traces).
• Develop Kafka-based streaming solutions — producers, consumers, schemas, and resilient data services.
• Engineer multi‑tenant observability data models, ensuring lineage, quality, and SLA compliance.
• Integrate enriched telemetry into Splunk for dashboards, alerting, analytics, and proactive insights (Observability Level 4).
• Implement schema governance (Avro/Protobuf), versioning, and compatibility controls.
• Build automated validation, replay, and backfill mechanisms for reliable data operations.
• Standardize telemetry across platforms using OpenTelemetry for metrics, tracing, and logs.
• Leverage LLMs to improve observability workflows—query assistance, anomaly summarization, and runbook automation.
• Collaborate with SRE, platform, and application teams on telemetry integration, alerting, and SLOs.
• Ensure security, compliance, RBAC, and encryption in all pipeline components.
• Maintain clear documentation for data flows, schemas, dashboards, and operational guides.

• Strong hands‑on experience with Kafka (producers/consumers, schema registry, KSQL, Kafka Streams).
• Deep understanding of OpenShift/Kubernetes telemetry, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and CLI tooling.
• Experience integrating telemetry into Splunk (HEC, UF, sourcetypes, CIM) and creating dashboards/alerts.
• Proficiency in Python or similar languages for ETL/ELT, enrichment, and validation workflows.
• Solid experience with Avro/Protobuf/JSON schemas and compatibility best practices.
• Knowledge of observability frameworks and ability to drive towards Level 4 maturity (proactive automation).
• Understanding of multi‑cluster and hybrid cloud telemetry architecture.
• Strong grounding in data security, RBAC, secrets management, and encryption.
• Excellent communication, analytical thinking, and documentation skills.

Diversity & Inclusion are fundamental to our culture, and Synechron is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. Our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiative ‘Same Difference’ is committed to fostering an inclusive culture – promoting equality, diversity and an environment that is respectful to all. We strongly believe that a diverse workforce helps build stronger, successful businesses as a global company. We encourage applicants from across diverse backgrounds, race, ethnicities, religion, age, marital status, gender, sexual orientations, or disabilities to apply. We empower our global workforce by offering flexible workplace arrangements, mentoring, internal mobility, learning and development programs, and more. All employment decisions at Synechron are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to the applicant’s gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disabled or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.