Data Platform Lead: Scalable, AI‑Driven Data Solutions

PA Consulting; City Of London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and lifestyle perks

25 days annual leave (+ Xmas Eve half‑

Generous pension

Annual performance-based bonus

PA share ownership

Cycle to work

Job summary

PA Consulting is seeking a Data Platform Tech Lead to design and deliver scalable, secure data platforms that empower analytics, AI, and operational workloads. You will guide cross-functional teams, shape modern data architectures, and collaborate with clients on complex engagements in a hybrid model.

The role emphasizes data governance, observability, and platform reliability, with opportunities to lead modernization efforts and enable GenAI-assisted development in delivery workflows.

Qualifications

• Experience leading data engineering or data platform teams.
• Delivered scalable data platforms in enterprise environments.
• Strong architectural decisions across ingestion, storage, processing, modelling, orchestration and serving.
• Applying software engineering practices to data platforms, including testing and CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code.
• Establishing data quality, observability, governance, metadata and security.
• Data platform modernization and migration including coexistence, cutover and decommissioning.
• Shaping end-to-end engineering lifecycle and communicating with engineers, clients and senior stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead technical teams through complex challenges and guide our clients toward successful digital transformations.
• Provide mentorship to engineers and foster continuous improvement.
• Collaborate with clients and engineers to design scalable, secure data platforms and pipelines.
• Contribute technical input to bids, proposals, and client discussions, shaping solutions and implementation plans.

Skills

Technical leadership

Data platform design

Ingestion/storage/processing

CI/CD & IaC

Data governance & security

Data modernization & migration

Architecture decisions

Stakeholder communication

Ambiguity management

Bid input & proposals

Tools

Databricks

Snowflake

Apache Spark

SQL

dbt

Delta Lake

Apache Iceberg

Airflow

Terraform

GitHub Actions

Job description

PA Consulting is seeking a Data Platform Tech Lead to design and deliver scalable, secure data platforms that empower analytics, AI, and operational workloads. You will guide cross-functional teams, shape modern data architectures, and collaborate with clients on complex engagements in a hybrid model.

The role emphasizes data governance, observability, and platform reliability, with opportunities to lead modernization efforts and enable GenAI-assisted development in delivery workflows.