Data Engineering Team Lead
Summary
Lead a distributed Data Engineering team (London, India, Poland) at a FTSE 100 fintech, owning delivery of batch and real-time data pipelines on GCP (BigQuery, Airflow, Kafka) while driving data quality and platform transformation.
A leading FTSE 100 fintech is looking for a Data Engineering Team Lead to join its global Data function and play a key role in the next phase of its data platform transformation.
This is an opportunity to take ownership of a critical engineering function within a large-scale, international environment, leading a team of Data Engineers across London, India and Poland.
The organisation is undertaking a major consolidation of its data estate onto GCP, with a clear focus on improving data quality, scalability and self-service access to trusted data across the business. The platform will increasingly support analytics, regulatory requirements, Data Science and AI/ML use cases.
The role
Reporting to the Head of Data Engineering, you will combine technical leadership, delivery ownership and people management. You will set engineering standards, guide technical decisions and ensure the team's work delivers reliable and scalable data capabilities.
Role Responsibilities
- Leading the delivery of critical batch and real-time data pipelines, including Kafka workloads
- Providing technical direction and maintaining high engineering standards across the squad
- Coaching and developing Data Engineers, including performance management and career development
- Driving data quality through data contracts, observability and SLA/SLO monitoring
- Working closely with stakeholders across Compliance, Marketing and Data Science
- Managing delivery commitments, risks and engineering performance metrics
- Contributing to the evolution of the organisation's GCP-based data platform
Role Requirements
- Strong hands-on experience designing and operating data pipelines on GCP, particularly BigQuery, Cloud Composer/Airflow and GCS
- Strong knowledge of Apache Kafka and real-time streaming architectures
- Previous experience leading or technically mentoring Data Engineers
- Strong understanding of data quality, data contracts, observability and SLOs
- Experience with SQL, dbt and modern data transformation patterns
- Excellent communication skills and the ability to work effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Experience within a regulated financial services/fintech environment would be highly beneficial
This is a strong opportunity for an experienced Data Engineering Lead who wants to combine technical leadership with genuine ownership of a large-scale data transformation programme.