Lead Data Engineer
Lead Data Engineer
Salary: £100,000 – £120,000 per annum
Location: Hybrid – 3 days per week in the London office
About the role
We are working with a fast-growing, product-driven SaaS start-up looking for a Lead Data Engineer to help shape and scale the data function. This is an excellent opportunity for a Senior or Principal Data Engineer ready to step into a leadership role and drive technical direction across a modern data stack.
Responsibilities
- Lead and mentor a small team of data engineers.
- Design, build and optimise data pipelines and integrations using Python and Airflow.
- Develop scalable, cloud-native solutions on AWS, leveraging services such as Snowflake, Kubernetes, and Terraform for infrastructure-as-code.
- Build and maintain robust APIs and streaming pipelines (Kafka) to support real-time and batch data needs.
- Partner closely with analytics, product, and engineering teams to ensure data is accurate, reliable, and driving business value.
Requirements
- Strong hands-on experience with AWS (Azure or GCP also considered).
- Excellent programming skills in Python.
- Proven background in API development and integration.
- Experience building and maintaining modern data pipelines using Airflow and Kafka.
- Solid understanding of Snowflake or similar cloud data warehouses.
- Experience with Kubernetes for container orchestration.
- Proficiency with Terraform or other IaC tools.
- Essential experience with dbt.
- Previous mentoring or leadership experience (formal line management not required).
- Strong communication skills and ability to excel in a fast-paced start-up environment.
Why join?
This role offers the opportunity to take real ownership within a scaling SaaS business, influencing architecture, tooling, and long-term strategy. Your work will have direct impact on product development and the wider company direction.