Lead Data Engineer

Lead Data Engineer

Industry: Risk Tech / SaaS

Location: Central Manchester, hybrid, two days a week on-site

Salary: £70,000 - £85,000 (maybe some wiggle room for the right person)

We're working with one of our longest-standing clients, a fast-growing risk tech SaaS business based in central Manchester. They build genuinely impressive products that combine data and AI to serve SMEs and risk teams, and right now they're looking for a Lead Data Engineer to own the backbone of their data platform.

We've placed people here before, and they love it. The tech is exciting, the team is strong, and the culture is a real standout. This is a business where people genuinely enjoy coming to work, and that comes through from day one.

The Role

This is a hands-on leadership position. You'll be designing and building near real-time data pipelines, setting the standards the rest of the team will follow, and helping shape the wider data strategy. It's a genuine opportunity to leave your mark on a platform that's central to everything the business does.

Key responsibilities include:

• Owning the ETL layer end-to-end, from PostgreSQL and SaaS sources through to the AWS data stack
• Building anonymisation and multi-tenant isolation into the platform from the ground up
• Championing data quality, treating data like a product, with tests, contracts and observability baked in
• Contributing to strategic decisions around warehouse vs lakehouse, build vs buy, batch vs streaming
• Setting the engineering bar for how the data team writes Python, SQL and infrastructure-as-code

What They're Looking For

Core experience needed:

• PostgreSQL at depth: logical replication, WAL, schema design
• CDC and event streaming using Debezium, Kafka, MSK, Kinesis, DMS or similar
• SaaS source ingestion via custom connectors or tools like Fivetran, Airbyte or Stitch
• Strong AWS data stack experience: S3, Glue, Lambda, Step Functions, Iceberg
• Senior Python and fluent SQL, typed and tested
• Privacy and multi-tenant isolation: pseudonymisation, PII redaction, RLS, IAM patterns
• Production discipline: data quality tooling (Great Expectations, Soda or equivalent) and IaC (Terraform or CDK)

Bonus points for: dimensional modelling, experience with Redshift, Snowflake, BigQuery or Databricks, reverse ETL, Airflow or Dagster, data lineage and cataloguing, or GRC / RegTech / FinTech domain exposure.

The Package

• £70,000 - £85,000 (with some flexibility for the right person)
• 30 days holiday + your birthday off
• Full private healthcare including dental
• Electric vehicle scheme
• Strong pension
• Genuine training, development and progression support
• 2 days per week in the Manchester city centre office, the rest from home

This is a brilliant role for a senior data engineer who's ready to step up, lead, and make a real impact at a business that's scaling fast and doing genuinely interesting work. If that sounds like you, get in touch. We'd love to tell you more.

At Inara Talent, we believe everyone deserves a fair chance to shine. We connect great people from all backgrounds with opportunities where they can thrive making sure hiring is fair, inclusive, and genuinely diverse. No matter your background, we focus on what matters: your talent.