Lead Data Engineer

Hybrid Working - 2-4 days per month in the office (East London / Essex)

Salary to £75k

A Lead Data Engineer is required to take technical ownership of an evolving Microsoft Fabric data platform.

Fabric has already been implemented and a number of key data sources are being ingested into the Bronze layer. The next phase is about maturing the platform through Silver and Gold, improving data quality and introducing consistent engineering standards and best practice across the environment.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role rather than a people-management position. You'll act as the senior technical authority and escalation point for the Data Engineering team, while remaining close to the architecture, pipelines and engineering work.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the technical architecture and engineering standards for the Microsoft Fabric platform
• Drive the maturity of the existing Fabric environment from Bronze through Silver and Gold
• Design, build and optimise scalable Fabric pipelines, Lakehouse and data engineering solutions
• Introduce consistent engineering approaches across pipelines, permissions, security, refresh processes and development practices
• Develop and optimise complex SQL queries, transformations and analytical data models
• Improve data cleansing, quality, governance, monitoring and overall platform reliability
• Modernise and consolidate data from a mixture of legacy/on-premise and cloud applications into Fabric
• Troubleshoot complex data and reporting issues, acting as the senior technical escalation point
• Coach and mentor Data Engineers through pairing, code review and practical guidance, raising capability and embedding best practice across the team
• Support downstream Power BI and self-service analytics through well-designed, reliable data models
• Establish clear technical documentation, standards and knowledge-sharing practices

Required Experience

• Strong hands-on Microsoft Fabric experience, including architectural design and engineering best practice
• Demonstrable experience implementing or maturing Medallion/Lakehouse architecture through Bronze, Silver and Gold
• Experience modernising or migrating legacy/on-premise data platforms into Fabric or a comparable modern data architecture
• Strong hands-on SQL expertise, including performance tuning and optimisation
• Experience designing and developing Fabric pipelines, transformations and analytical data models
• Strong understanding of data cleansing, data quality, governance and production platform reliability
• Experience establishing engineering standards and improving inconsistent or immature data environments
• Comfortable acting as the senior technical escalation point for other Data Engineers
• Experience coaching or mentoring engineers and sharing technical best practice
• Good understanding of Power BI and the requirements of downstream reporting and semantic models
• Microsoft Fabric certification, particularly DP-600 and/or DP-700
• DevOps / CI-CD experience within data engineering
• Experience decommissioning or replacing legacy ETL tooling such as SSIS
• Experience working within complex enterprise data environments

Interviews are planned for September.