Lead Data Engineer- Basingstoke/ £75,000

Lead Data Engineer- £75,000

Does Not Offer Sponsorship Industry: Banking and Financial Services Location: Hybrid- Basingstoke (3 Days a Week) Key Responsibilities

• Lead the evolution of our data engineering practice, supporting modernisation, automation, and scalability.

• Design and optimise Databricks architecture, data models, and deployment standards.

• Re-build and re-platform core components to handle growing data volumes and business demand.

• Implement better controls around change management, lineage, and deployment (DevOps for data).

• Introduce new tooling around change deployment and governance in partnership with external consultants.

• Improve data quality through robust monitoring, testing frameworks, and alerting solutions.

• Maintain and modernise SQL workloads, including legacy databases and reporting environments.

• Support upgrades, platform enhancements, and new data tooling selection.

• Provide best-practice guidance to the wider data function and line-manage up to 3 individuals.

• Ensure documentation, data dictionaries, lineage, and governance standards are embedded across the team.

• Strong expertise with SQL, particularly Databricks SQL.

• Demonstrable experience designing data models (e.g., star schema) and scalable architecture.

• Knowledge of Azure Modern Data Warehouse tools: Synapse, Databricks, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog.

• Experience with pipeline orchestration (e.g., Synapse pipelines).

• Proven background in ITIL change management and incident management.

• Implementing data quality controls, monitoring, and alerting in production environments.

• Experience managing data lineage, glossaries, and data dictionaries.

• Exposure to legacy or DBA-style SQL performance work.

• Experience working alongside or managing consultancy partners.

• Background in high-data-volume or regulated industries.

• Help choose and implement the tooling that will define our future.

• A strategic, hands-on role that truly shapes our platform.

• The chance to modernise a growing data function from the ground up.

• A team of 8 (4 engineers) with consultancy support and room to scale.

• Long-term career impact: your work sets the foundation for the next phase of our data maturity.