Data Technical Lead

Company description

Working approach

• The role uses hybrid working, with time in the office or on client site a minimum of two days per week.
• Time spent in the office or on client site varies by role or assignment and can reach five days per week on a client site.

Role overview

Technology landscape

• Potential technologies include AWS, Azure, GCP, Databricks, Snowflake, Spark, SQL, Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, dbt, Great Expectations, Airflow, Kafka, Terraform, CloudFormation, Azure Bicep, and CI/CD tools.
• Potential architectural approaches include lakehouse, medallion, data mesh, domain-oriented patterns, data products, DataOps, observability, and infrastructure as code.
• The role may involve modernisation, migration, GenAI-assisted development, agentic workflows, and engineering, security, and governance controls.

What you can expect

• Work to agile best practices with multiple teams and stakeholders on client and internal projects.
• Steer technical teams through complex challenges and guide clients toward successful digital transformations.
• Provide mentorship to engineers and support continuous improvement.
• Participate in in-person whiteboarding and asynchronous team communication.
• Help teams use GenAI effectively across engineering delivery with appropriate practices, controls, and guardrails.

Essential requirements

• Technically lead data engineering or data platform teams while enabling engineers to own and deliver solutions.
• Design and deliver scalable, reliable, and cost-effective modern data platforms in enterprise environments.
• Make architectural decisions across ingestion, storage, processing, modelling, orchestration, and serving.
• Apply software engineering practices including testing, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code.
• Establish data quality, observability, governance, metadata, and security approaches.
• Lead data platform modernisation and migration, including coexistence, cutover, and decommissioning.
• Make pragmatic technology choices and understand trade-offs across platform, storage, processing, and integration patterns.
• Shape the end-to-end engineering lifecycle for software and data products.
• Communicate clearly with engineers, clients, and senior stakeholders in complex delivery environments.
• Turn ambiguous business problems into practical technical solutions.
• Provide technical input into bids, proposals, and client solution discussions.

Life at PA

• PA supports learning and growth through technical and non-technical training budgets, certifications, knowledge sharing, coaching, and mentoring.
• Benefits include private healthcare-related perks, annual leave, pension, community initiatives, performance-based bonus, share ownership, and tax-efficient benefits.

Application and checks

• Some UK roles require security clearance, and all PA people undergo background checks to achieve the Baseline Personnel Security Standard.
• The recruitment process includes recruiter discussion, competency interview, technical interview, and a final meeting with a PA leader.