Lead Data Engineer: Hands-On Execution& Transformation Leadership
Location: London (Hybrid Working Model)
Contract Length: 12-Month Engagement
Rate: Up to £600 per day (Outside IR35)
A Tier 1 Insurance Leader is undertaking a pivotal, large-scale data strategy transformation, migrating its entire data estate to a cutting-edge, cloud-native platform built on Snowflake (hosted on Azure).
We are seeking a highly experienced Lead Data Engineer for a critical, multi-faceted leadership role. This engagement demands a senior professional who can seamlessly integrate deep, recent, hands-on engineering execution with strategic team guidance to deliver a scalable, high-performance data ecosystem. Candidates whose recent roles are predominantly architectural or governance-focused will not be a fit.
The Mandate: Deep Execution, Strategic Delivery, and Cultural Change
This role requires a leader focused on depth and delivery, not just breadth and design.
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Deep Hands-On Engineering: Act as the principal technical expert, leading the development and implementation of highly scalable and repeatable data pipelines in Snowflake. You must have demonstrable, recent experience executing complex data modeling standards using dbt (data build tool) for transformation and orchestration.
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Crucial Focus: Experience must be centered on enterprise-level data migrations and large-scale transformations on Snowflake, not just database management or maintenance.
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Engineering Governance & Standards: Establish best practices, clear coding standards, and repeatable CI/CD workflows, ensuring operational excellence across delivery teams.
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Leadership & Cultural Influence (Delivery Focus): Provide technical and professional leadership, adapting to ever-changing team dynamics. We require a leader with experience scaling guidance and influence across large teams (up to 30 people) and a proven ability to positively shape the engineering culture.
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Note on Contract Longevity: We seek candidates who demonstrate stability and commitment through their career history in key delivery roles.
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Architectural Partnership: Partner closely with internal architecture groups, ensuring engineering standards align with strategic architectural goals.
Essential Experience: Focus on Depth and Migration
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Snowflake & dbt Mastery (Recent & Relevant): Proven, recent, hands-on experience in designing and deploying data solutions within a production Snowflake environment. Expert command of dbt for sophisticated data modeling and transformation.
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Enterprise Migration Experience: Mandatory experience leading or playing a primary role in large-scale data estate migrations(on-premises to cloud) and complex transformation projects using Snowflake.
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Focus on Delivery: Candidates must demonstrate a career trajectory emphasizing deep engineering and delivery over high-level governance or non-implementing architectural design in recent years.
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Core Data Skills: Comprehensive understanding of Data Warehousing methodologies, modern ELT/ETL patterns, Analytics Engineering principles, and advanced SQL for performance optimization.
This is a unique opportunity to define the data strategy through execution for a Tier 1 institution and drive cultural change through technical thought leadership.
We invite experienced data leaders with a strong history of hands-on delivery and enterprise migration experience to engage with us on this critical transformation.
