Data Engineering Lead

Salary: £40,000 - 78,000 per year

Requirements:

• We have a strong track record as a data engineer or data lead, with years of experience and the credibility to operate confidently in front of clients.
• We have technical leadership experience, including leading a team or function.
• We are comfortable presenting to senior client stakeholders and handling commercial pressure.
• We can translate engineering constraints into business terms and negotiate realistic commitments.
• We are willing to build a public presence in the data community over time.
• We have shipped real production data systems, with depth across SQL, Python for data, data modelling, transformation architecture, pipeline design, data testing, observability, CI/CD for data, data governance, cost optimisation, and platform tooling.
• We have experience with orchestration, warehouses, ingestion, transformation, and AI-native engineering workflows.
• Consultancy or agency experience is a strong plus, but other real client or stakeholder-facing experience is also acceptable.
• We are confident and credible with clients and prospects, including when holding a firm technical or commercial line.
• We can contribute to deep technical reviews across architecture, data modelling, and pipeline design.
• We are self-motivated and comfortable helping shape a practice with an evolving remit.
• We work well with commercial and client services colleagues who are not technical.
• We are energised by variety across clients, stacks, and problems.
• We are happy to travel regularly for client work, workshops, and industry events.

Responsibilities:

• We do hands-on data engineering work, including pipelines, transformation layers, models, and supporting infrastructure.
• We adapt our delivery to different client contexts, including legacy warehouse migrations, greenfield lakehouses, and rescue work on transformation layers.
• We guide the wider team and unblock hard technical problems as our remit grows.
• We define and evolve our internal standards for data work, including testing, documentation, project structure, and code review.
• We mentor and grow data engineers across the company.
• We join client and prospect meetings as the technical authority on data.
• We shape proposals and pitches, translating client problems into credible data approaches and defensible scopes.
• We act as the escalation point on live data engagements when technical judgement is needed.
• We travel to client sites for workshops, discovery sessions, and in-person relationship building.
• We represent us at external data events and in the wider community.
• We own the growth of our data practice, including capability, reputation, and headcount over time.
• We contribute to attracting and hiring strong data engineers.
• We support our sales team so that data becomes something we can proactively sell.

Technologies:

• AI
• CI/CD
• Hardware
• Support
• Python
• SQL
• Airflow
• BigQuery
• Data Vault
• Databricks
• Fivetran
• RAG
• Snowflake
• Spark
• dbt

More:

We are YLD, a software engineering and product design consultancy founded in 2013 and headquartered in London, with delivery teams in Lisbon and Porto. We work with engineering and product leaders who want a stronger connection between strategy and execution, embedding senior engineers and designers inside client teams and their delivery rhythms. AI runs through how our teams work, and we help clients adopt it into their own workflows too. This senior role is based in London within our Engineering department, reports to our Head of Engineering, and combines hands-on delivery with client-facing work, practice growth, and external visibility. We offer private health care through Vitality, enhanced fully paid maternity and paternity leave for up to 6 months, a company pension scheme, 25 days annual holiday excluding public holidays, a £2,000 annual training and conferences allowance, a £300 annual hardware allowance, mental health support, a performance-based bonus, a company laptop, generous referral schemes, and a remote-first working environment with flexible working and work–life balance as standard.

last updated 34 week of 2026