Lead Data Engineer – Databricks

Lead Data Engineer (Leeds, UK)

Lead Data Engineer

Location: Leeds 2-3 days a week, United Kingdom (Hybrid)

Employment Type: Permanent

Sector: Data & Analytics / Retail

Salary: £75k to £95k + Bonus

About the Company

Our client is a global data, analytics, and AI-driven organisation that helps enterprises modernise operations, improve decision-making, and accelerate growth. With a significant international presence and thousands of employees worldwide, the company delivers advanced analytics, cloud, and data engineering solutions across industries including retail, financial services, insurance, healthcare, and media.

The Opportunity

We are seeking an experienced Lead Data Engineer to provide technical leadership across the design, development, deployment, and optimisation of scalable data platforms and analytics solutions.

This role combines hands-on engineering with team leadership, mentoring engineers, guiding architecture decisions, and driving best practices across data engineering delivery. You will work closely with business stakeholders, analysts, and architects to translate complex requirements into robust, enterprise-grade data solutions.

Key responsibilities include

1. Leading the design and implementation of cloud-based data pipelines, ETL processes, and analytics solutions.
2. Building scalable batch and real-time data integration solutions using technologies such as Azure Data Factory, Databricks, SQL Server, SSIS, Airflow, Matillion, and Hadoop-based tools.
3. Developing conceptual, logical, and physical data models aligned to business requirements.
4. Driving technical standards, code quality, testing strategies, CI/CD practices, and documentation.
5. Mentoring and supporting data engineers and consultants to foster a high-performing delivery team.
6. Designing and delivering reporting and self-service analytics solutions using Power BI, Tableau, Qlik, SSRS, and SSAS.
7. Collaborating with stakeholders to analyse data requirements and define scalable transformation and reporting strategies.
8. Ensuring solutions are secure, performant, maintainable, and aligned with enterprise architecture standards.

What We’re Looking For

Essential

• Significant experience delivering enterprise data integration, data warehousing, and cloud data engineering solutions.
• Strong hands-on expertise with Azure, Databricks, SQL Server, and modern data platform technologies.
• Proven experience leading technical teams and mentoring engineers.
• Deep understanding of data modelling approaches, including dimensional modelling, ODS, and Data Vault concepts.
• Experience with Spark / PySpark and large-scale data processing frameworks.
• Strong knowledge of orchestration tools such as Azure Data Factory, Airflow, or similar platforms.
• Experience working within Agile delivery environments and using tools such as Azure DevOps, Jira, Git, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Excellent stakeholder management, communication, and problem-solving skills.

Desirable

• Consulting experience and exposure to client-facing delivery.
• Experience with Snowflake, Redshift, Synapse, Oracle, or other enterprise data platforms.
• Knowledge of AWS or GCP data architectures.
• Experience contributing to solution strategy, innovation initiatives, or pre-sales activities.
• Bachelor’s degree (or equivalent experience); Master’s degree is advantageous.

Why Join?

Competitive package

Salary, bonus, private healthcare, life assurance, income protection, and pension.

Financial wellbeing

Cashback schemes, retail discounts, and a Cycle to Work programme.

Learning & development

Access to training, workshops, online learning, and career development opportunities.

Flexible hybrid working

A collaborative culture that supports balance and flexibility.

Diversity & Inclusion

Our client is committed to building a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone is treated with dignity, fairness, and respect. They welcome applications from all qualified candidates and make employment decisions based on skills, experience, and potential.

They are committed to providing an accessible recruitment process and will make reasonable adjustments where required. Their goal is to create an environment where every employee feels valued, supported, and able to thrive.