Lead Data Engineer - Snowflake

Salary: £80,000 - 80,000 per year

Requirements:

• Proven experience in data engineering with hands-on experience designing, building and operating production data pipelines in Snowflake
• Solid leadership experience working with a modern cloud data platform, with direct Snowflake exposure
• dbt modelling experience, or the capability and willingness to own that learning quickly, alongside a commitment to continuous professional development
• Advanced SQL, including complex transformation logic, data modelling and query performance optimisation
• Strong dimensional modelling knowledge, including facts, dimensions, conformed dimensions and slowly changing dimensions
• Hands-on engineering credibility, with the judgement to know when to build, when to simplify, and when to stop
• Proven people leadership, including setting direction, giving feedback and developing engineers
• Strong stakeholder and relationship management skills across technical and non-technical audiences
• Ability to explain technical trade-offs, and their cost and risk implications, to senior stakeholders
• Confidence holding a technical position with third-party suppliers and Group colleagues, constructively
• Must be able to work from our Folkestone office a minimum of 3 times a week

Responsibilities:

• Act as the senior technical resource on the Travel Data Warehouse build, working alongside implementation partner consultants and taking on delivery ownership as partner engagement tapers
• Lead our Travel data engineering team and support professional development
• Design, build and test dbt models across the intermediate and mart layers of the Travel Snowflake platform, re-implementing documented business logic reverse-engineered from the two legacy estates
• Own the Travel DW stack end-to-end, including repository structure, model and naming standards, materialisation policy, test discipline, documentation, code review and promotion between development, test and production environments
• Work with the project team to build and then take ownership of the CI/CD pipeline so that every change is built and tested automatically before production
• Own orchestration of the Travel transformation layer and the operational interface with the Saga Group ingestion framework, including the agreed handover contract and the handling of late or failed loads
• Establish monitoring, alerting and incident response for the nightly build so that failures are detected, triaged and fixed
• Make data quality testing a routine part of the build, including source freshness checks, schema and referential tests, and reconciliation against legacy outputs during parallel running
• Implement data masking on Saga Travel objects in Snowflake, mirroring the Group data protection taxonomy, and own those policies on Travel-owned objects
• Monitor and manage Snowflake consumption, tagging workloads so that platform cost is reported and controlled
• Work with business SMEs and data analysts to translate agreed business definitions into implemented tested models
• Build the conformed Travel dimensions and the unified trading view that bring the two Travel estates together
• Support decommissioning of the legacy Holidays and Cruise platforms once migrated, including cutover planning, verification and rollback contingency
• Maintain clear technical documentation and runbooks so that the platform is supportable by more than one person

Technologies:

• CI/CD
• Cloud
• Data Warehouse
• Support
• SQL
• Snowflake
• dbt
• AI

More:

We are Saga, the UKs specialist provider of products and services to people aged over 50. Over the past 75 years we have become the most trusted brand among UK consumers in this demographic, recognised for high-quality products and exceptional standards of service. Our portfolio includes cruises, holidays, insurance, personal finance products and Saga Magazine. This Lead Data Engineer role is based in Folkestone on a hybrid working pattern, with a minimum of three days a week in our Folkestone office. You will join our Data & Analytics team at an exciting point in our data journey, helping to build a new, integrated Snowflake platform across our Holidays and Cruise businesses. We offer a strong benefits package including 25 days holiday plus bank holidays, the option to buy additional leave, pension matched up to 10%, annual bonus, life assurance, wellbeing support, colleague discounts, enhanced family leave, income protection and access to Saga Academy. We are committed to an inclusive, accessible and multigenerational workplace where colleagues can be themselves and make a difference.

last updated 37 week of 2026