Director, Data Engineering in UK at Jobgether

This position is posted by Jobgether on behalf of a partner company. We are currently looking for a Director, Data Engineering in the United Kingdom.

In this role, you will lead the design, development, and scaling of a modern enterprise data platform that underpins high-impact analytics and data products across a complex, multi-system environment. You will guide a growing team of data engineers while remaining close to the technical work, ensuring strong architectural decisions and engineering excellence. The position sits at the intersection of leadership and hands-on delivery, shaping how data is ingested, transformed, governed, and consumed across the organization. You will play a key role in building reliable, scalable, and well-governed data foundations that support business intelligence, product analytics, and operational use cases. Working closely with data architecture, analytics, and governance teams, you will help define standards that ensure consistency and trust in data. This is a high-impact leadership role in a fast-evolving, acquisition-driven environment where data maturity is a strategic priority.

In this role, you will define and lead the engineering vision for a scalable, high-quality data platform while actively contributing to its technical evolution:

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of data engineers, fostering a culture of ownership, collaboration, and technical excellence.
• Contribute hands-on to the design and development of data pipelines, integrations, and core platform components.
• Own and evolve a Databricks-based lakehouse architecture, ensuring scalability, performance, and maintainability.
• Define and enforce engineering standards across ingestion, transformation (dbt), testing, CI/CD, documentation, and observability.
• Design robust ingestion frameworks for complex, multi-source environments, including M&A-driven integrations.
• Ensure reliable data pipelines with strong monitoring, lineage, and full historical traceability.
• Partner with analytics and governance teams to ensure data models and contracts support downstream business use cases.
• Drive operational excellence, including incident response, reliability improvements, and SLA adherence.
• Support hiring, team scaling, and long-term engineering capacity planning.

The ideal candidate combines strong technical depth in data engineering with proven leadership experience in complex, fast-moving environments:

• 3+ years in data engineering with at least 2+ years in a senior or leadership role.
• Strong hands-on expertise with Databricks (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Spark) and modern data lakehouse architectures.
• Proficiency in Python and SQL for building scalable data pipelines.
• Experience with dbt or similar transformation frameworks.
• Strong background in building and operating data pipelines using tools such as Fivetran, Airflow, or equivalents.
• Deep understanding of data modelling, data warehousing, and distributed data systems.
• Proven ability to define and enforce engineering best practices (testing, CI/CD, observability, documentation).
• Experience working with cloud platforms, ideally AWS.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to translate technical decisions into business impact.
• Ability to balance hands-on engineering with leadership and cross-functional collaboration.
• Experience in complex environments such as M&A, multi-system integrations, or platform migrations is highly valuable.
• Familiarity with data quality, governance, BI tools, and modern analytics ecosystems is a plus.

• Competitive salary with performance-related bonus opportunities.
• Flexible working arrangements and remote-first environment.
• Comprehensive health, wellness, and employee support programs.
• Flexible time off policies to support work-life balance.
• Career development programs and long-term growth opportunities.
• Collaborative and innovative engineering culture.
• Opportunity to shape a modern enterprise data platform from the ground up.