Lead Data Engineer/Technical Lead - Outside IR35 - SC Cleared

Tech Lead/Lead Data Engineer (AWS Data Platform)
Rate: £500 - £550 p/d outside IR35
Length: 1st April to end of November (initially)
Location: London (hybrid - typically 1 day per week on-site, remaining remote)
Security Clearance: SC Clearance essential

Overview
We're looking for a hands-on Lead Data Engineer to lead a small team delivering secure, scalable data solutions within a highly regulated environment. You'll take technical ownership across an AWS-based data platform using S3, Glue, and Redshift, working closely with delivery leadership, architecture stakeholders, and product teams to deliver incremental value.

This role suits someone who can balance technical leadership, hands-on engineering, and stakeholder-facing communication, while maintaining strong standards around security, quality, and operational resilience.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a small engineering team across data engineering, analytics engineering, and DevOps.
• Own the technical design of data ingestion, transformation, storage, and access patterns.
• Drive engineering standards including code quality, testing, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, and security-by-design.
• Translate high-level requirements into solution increments, technical designs, and well-scoped delivery tickets.
• Deliver and optimise data modelling approaches (eg, star/snowflake schemas) and performance tuning practices.
• Build reliable and cost-effective ETL/ELT pipelines, including orchestration and event-driven patterns where appropriate.
• Partner with security stakeholders to ensure compliance, including IAM least privilege, encryption, auditability, and secure access controls.
• Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines for data workflows and platform components.
• Ensure strong monitoring and operational discipline using cloud-native tooling and engineering best practice.
• Communicate technical decisions, trade-offs, risks, and delivery progress to senior stakeholders.
• Promote a culture of learning, quality, and continuous improvement.

Required Skills & Experience

• Proven experience as a Tech Lead/Lead Data Engineer delivering AWS-based data platforms.
• Strong hands-on AWS experience, including:
  
  • Amazon S3 (data lake patterns, partitioning, life cycle policies, cost optimisation)
  • AWS Glue (Jobs, Crawlers, PySpark, Glue Data Catalog, orchestration)
  • Amazon Redshift (performance tuning, sort/dist keys, Spectrum, WLM)
• Strong development skills across:
  
  • Python (including PySpark)
  • SQL (DDL/DML, analytical queries, data performance considerations)
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or CloudFormation).
• CI/CD experience using tools such as GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, CodePipeline, CodeBuild, etc.
• Strong understanding of security & governance in regulated environments:
  
  • IAM, KMS encryption, Secrets Manager/SSM, audit logging
• Delivery capability across Agile (Scrum/Kanban) environments with strong backlog refinement discipline.
• Confident stakeholder management with the ability to explain technical choices and gain consensus.