Data Platform Lead (Snowflake) - AI-Ready & Transformation

SAGA PLC; Folkestone; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

25 days holiday

Additional leave option

Pension scheme up to 10%

Bonus up to 5%

Life assurance 4x salary

Wellbeing programme

Colleague discounts

Saga Academy access

Job summary

Saga plc is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to shape how data supports decision-making across Holidays and Cruise businesses. You will build a new governed Snowflake platform, lead the data engineering capability, and own the platform's evolution from ingestion to serving.

Expect hands-on work, technical leadership, and collaboration with Saga Group teams. You will lead and develop a Data Engineer while driving CI/CD, data governance, and masking policies.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated leadership of data teams and engineers.
• Hands-on Snowflake data platform design and operation.
• Proficiency with dbt modelling and ETL pipelines.
• Advanced SQL with complex transformations and performance tuning.
• Strong dimensional modelling and slowly changing dimensions.
• Proven ability to communicate with technical and business stakeholders.
• Experience with data governance and security policies.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Saga Travel data engineering team, supporting professional development
• Design, building and testing dbt models across the intermediate and mart layers of the Travel Snowflake platform, re-implementing documented business logic reverse-engineered from the two legacy estates
• Owning the Travel DW stack end-to-end: repository structure, model and naming standards, materialisation policy, test discipline, documentation, code review and promotion between development, test and production environments
• Working on with project team to build and then take ownership of the CI/CD pipeline so that every change is built and tested automatically before it reaches production
• Owning orchestration of the Travel transformation layer and the operational interface with the Saga Group ingestion framework, including the agreed handover contract and the handling of late or failed loads
• Establishing monitoring, alerting and incident response for the nightly build so that failures are detected, triaged and fixed
• Making data quality testing a routine part of the build, including source freshness checks, schema and referential tests, and reconciliation against legacy outputs during parallel running
• Implementing data masking on Saga Travel objects in Snowflake, mirroring the Group data protection taxonomy, and own those policies on Travel- owned objects
• Monitoring and managing Snowflake consumption, tagging workloads so that platform cost is reported and controlled
• Working with business SMEs and data analysts to translate agreed business definitions into implemented tested models
• Building the conformed Travel dimensions and the unified trading view that bring the two Travel estates together
• Supporting decommissioning of the legacy Holidays and Cruise platforms once migrated, including cutover planning, verification and rollback contingency
• Maintaining clear technical documentation and runbooks so that the platform is supportable by more than one person

Skills

Leadership

Snowflake

dbt modelling

Advanced SQL

Dimensional modelling

Stakeholder management

Cloud data platform

Tools

Snowflake

dbt

SQL

Job description

Saga plc is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to shape how data supports decision-making across Holidays and Cruise businesses. You will build a new governed Snowflake platform, lead the data engineering capability, and own the platform's evolution from ingestion to serving.

Expect hands-on work, technical leadership, and collaboration with Saga Group teams. You will lead and develop a Data Engineer while driving CI/CD, data governance, and masking policies.