Data Team Lead

Lead Data Engineer: Hands-On Execution & Transformation Leadership

Location: London (Hybrid Working Model)

Contract Length: 12-Month Engagement

Rate: Up to £600 per day (Outside IR35)

A Tier 1 Financial Services company is undertaking a pivotal, large-scale data strategy transformation, migrating its entire data estate to a cutting-edge, cloud-native platform built on Snowflake (hosted on Azure) .

We are seeking a highly experienced Lead Data Engineer for a critical, multi-faceted leadership role . This engagement demands a senior professional who can seamlessly integrate deep, recent, hands-on engineering execution with strategic team guidance to deliver a scalable, high-performance data ecosystem. Candidates whose recent roles are predominantly architectural or governance-focused will not be a fit.

The Mandate: Deep Execution, Strategic Delivery, and Cultural Change

This role requires a leader focused on depth and delivery , not just breadth and design.

• Deep Hands-On Engineering: Act as the principal technical expert, leading the development and implementation of highly scalable and repeatable data pipelines in Snowflake . You must have demonstrable, recent experience executing complex data modeling standards using dbt (data build tool) for transformation and orchestration.
• Crucial Focus: Experience must be centered on enterprise-level data migrations and large-scale transformations on Snowflake, not just database management or maintenance.
• Engineering Governance & Standards: Establish best practices, clear coding standards, and repeatable CI/CD workflows, ensuring operational excellence across delivery teams.
• Leadership & Cultural Influence (Delivery Focus): Provide technical and professional leadership, adapting to ever-changing team dynamics. We require a leader with experience scaling guidance and influence across large teams (up to 30 people) and a proven ability to positively shape the engineering culture.
• Note on Contract Longevity: We seek candidates who demonstrate stability and commitment through their career history in key delivery roles.
• Architectural Partnership: Partner closely with internal architecture groups, ensuring engineering standards align with strategic architectural goals.

Essential Experience: Focus on Depth and Migration

• Snowflake & dbt Mastery (Recent & Relevant): Proven, recent, hands-on experience in designing and deploying data solutions within a production Snowflake environment. Expert command of dbt for sophisticated data modeling and transformation.
• Enterprise Migration Experience: Mandatory experience leading or playing a primary role in large-scale data estate migrations (on-premises to cloud) and complex transformation projects using Snowflake.
• Focus on Delivery: Candidates must demonstrate a career trajectory emphasizing deep engineering and delivery over high-level governance or non-implementing architectural design in recent years.
• Core Data Skills: Comprehensive understanding of Data Warehousing methodologies, modern ELT/ETL patterns, Analytics Engineering principles, and advanced SQL for performance optimization.

This is a unique opportunity to define the data strategy through execution for a Tier 1 institution and drive cultural change through technical thought leadership.

We invite experienced data leaders with a strong history of hands-on delivery and enterprise migration experience to engage with us on this critical transformation.