McKesson
Senior Data Engineer
Job Description
Salary: £60,000 - 100,000 per year
Requirements:- Degree or equivalent, typically requiring 7+ years of relevant experience
- Bachelors degree level or above
- 6+ years experience in data engineering or platform engineering, including at least 2 years at senior or lead level
- 4+ years experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines, deployment workflows, and associated governance processes
- Advanced SQL and Python, with hands-on experience building data pipelines and transformations at scale
- Hands-on experience with a modern cloud data stack, including Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, and Databricks, on a cloud platform (Azure preferred)
- Demonstrated experience delivering data lineage and traceability within a regulated environment (e.g. SOX, financial services, healthcare, or similar)
- Experience contributing to platform migrations, re-architecture, or modernisation programmes
- Proven ability to present technical concepts to non-technical and senior stakeholders, including Finance, and influence decisions through practical recommendations
- Experience maintaining Infrastructure as Code for cloud-based data platforms
- Exposure to containerised or distributed systems (AKS advantageous), including deployment, scaling, and operational considerations
- Experience operating Airflow at scale, including DAG reliability, scheduling, and failure handling
- Strong version control, branching strategies, and release process experience
- Experience with test-driven development and automated testing within CI/CD workflows
- Ability to define and enforce standardised engineering patterns across a shared codebase
- Experience with operational reliability, including monitoring, structured logging, alerting, and systematic failure recovery
- PySpark experience desirable
- Experience supporting Airflow in a self-managed environment desirable
- Experience in a business building a data platform from the ground up desirable
- Take technical ownership of platform components, ensuring quality and consistency
- Establish, apply, and evolve engineering best practices, design patterns, and coding standards
- Define reusable patterns and frameworks across the data platform, including layered/medallion architecture approaches
- Identify opportunities to improve performance, cost efficiency, scalability, and reliability
- Contribute to the target architecture and long-term platform direction
- Design and build robust, scalable data pipelines using Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, ADF, and Python
- Apply strong practices in test-driven development, monitoring, logging, and observability
- Own more complex technical solutions and problem-solving
- Support production issues and drive root-cause improvements rather than quick fixes
- Ensure data lineage and traceability across the data lifecycle so any figure can be traced back to source
- Ensure sensitive data is appropriately protected within the data governance framework
- Work with IT teams to ensure solutions meet governance and compliance requirements
- Understand and manage the implications of production changes within a controlled release process
- Contribute to and maintain Infrastructure as Code for the platform in collaboration with the Infrastructure team
- Work within and help mature CI/CD pipelines, deployment workflows, and governance processes
- Continuously improve how the team builds, tests, and deploys data pipelines
- Bring forward ideas to improve the platform, tooling, and developer experience
- Evaluate emerging technologies and contribute to adoption decisions
- Support platform evolution, including re-architecture and migration activities
- Support other Data Engineers by sharing best practices and technical approaches
- Collaborate closely with Analytics & Data Insights, Software Engineering, and IT/Infrastructure
- Present technical work and recommendations to a range of audiences, including company-wide forums
- Build strong working relationships with business stakeholders, including Finance, and translate technical concepts into clear, practical terms
- Airflow
- Azure
- CI/CD
- Cloud
- Databricks
- Support
- Python
- PySpark
- SQL
- Security
- Snowflake
- dbt
More:
We are the technical owner of the ClarusONE data platform, a fast-growing environment where this hands-on engineering role will help shape reliability, scalability, security, and quality. We work within a data governance framework to protect sensitive data and ensure traceability end to end, partnering closely with Analytics, Data Science, Software Engineering, IT/Infrastructure, and Finance. This is a hybrid role based in the UK, with an expectation of two days per week onsite. Our location is London, and this is a full-time position.
last updated 36 week of 2026
Interested in this role?
Submit your application now
How to Apply
About McKesson
McKesson
London
IT
Skills & Technologies
Inferred from job description
Salary Insight
£80,000
This role
£75,000
UK median
This salary is 7% above the UK median for Senior roles (£75,000/yr).
Based on 2024–2025 UK technology sector benchmarks