Test Lead - Cloud & Data Platform (Lakehouse)

Job Title: Test Lead / Test Manager

Work Model: Hybrid (2 days/week in office)

Location: London, UK

Engagement Type: Contract

Must have Skills: Cloud & Data Platform (Lakehouse)

Core Technical Skills

Terraform (IaC testing, unit tests, state management) | Advanced |

GitLab CI/CD (pipeline testing, matrix jobs, artefacts) | Advanced |

AWS data services (S3, IAM, Glue, Lake Formation, EventBridge, CloudWatch, Lambda) | Intermediate–Advanced |

Security scanning tools (Checkov, tfsec) | Intermediate |

Data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, DBT, Apache Iceberg) | Intermediate |

Python (test automation, pipeline utilities) | Intermediate |

SRE practices (SLIs/SLOs, chaos engineering, performance testing) | Intermediate |

Compliance testing (encryption, tagging, data residency) | Intermediate |

Role Overview:

As a Test Lead / Test Manager, you will be responsible for defining and executing end-to-end testing strategies to validate the quality, reliability, security, and compliance of a large-scale, multi-platform cloud data lakehouse on AWS. You will champion a shift-left testing approach aligned with SRE principles and lead quality initiatives across infrastructure, data, and platform layers.

Key Responsibilities:

Lead the design and execution of end-to-end testing across a three-tier lakehouse architecture (landing, curated, analytics zones)

Define and implement DBT testing strategies, including schema validation, data assertions, and freshness checks

Oversee testing of AWS Glue ETL pipelines, ensuring transformation accuracy, incremental processing, and robust data quality controls

Validate Snowflake environments, including multi-tenant setups, warehouse performance, storage integrations, and RBAC models

Ensure reliability of event-driven orchestration workflows (EventBridge, Airflow/Astronomer, Step Functions), including exception and failure handling

Drive test automation, CI/CD integration, and quality engineering best practices

Collaborate with cross-functional teams including data engineers, platform engineers, and SRE teams

Provide leadership, mentoring, and governance across the testing lifecycle

Key Skills & Experience:

Strong experience in Test Leadership / Test Management roles

Hands-on experience with AWS data services and cloud-native testing approaches

Expertise in data pipeline testing, ETL validation, and data quality frameworks

Experience with DBT, Snowflake, and modern data lakehouse architectures

Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code testing, and automation frameworks

Strong understanding of event-driven architectures and orchestration tools

Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills