Head of Data Engineering — Build Modern Data Platform & Products

M&G FA Limited; City Of London; On-site; GBP 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Pension up to 18%

Share Save and Share Incentive Plan

38 days annual leave

Time Off When You Need It

Inspiring Families policy (parental/ha

Private Healthcare & Life Assurance

Job summary

M&G is seeking a Head of Data Engineering to lead a growing team across the UK and India. You will own ingestion, transformation and delivery of data on a Snowflake-centric platform, moving from fragmented pipelines to a modern, governed data products architecture.

This leadership role requires hands-on expertise in medallion and lakehouse patterns, DataOps, CI/CD, and data governance. You will build scalable data products that support investment decisions, client reporting and AI use cases

Qualifications

• Significant experience in data engineering, including experience leading data engineering teams within Asset Management or Financial Services.
• Hands-on experience leading Snowflake platform implementation, ideally in an asset management setting.
• Deep technical knowledge of modern data platform architecture, including medallion and lakehouse patterns, ELT and dimensional or domain data modelling.
• A track record of designing and delivering data products, including semantic layer implementation for AI and analytics use.
• Practical experience embedding data governance tooling into delivery, covering data catalogue, data quality, lineage and data observability.
• Strong understanding of cloud security, data privacy, access management and regulatory control requirements.
• Track record of collaborating and building effective relationships with colleagues across data and wider technology function.
• You should be able to share ownership, manage dependencies and agree joint priorities.
• Experience leading and developing offshore engineering teams as an integrated part of the function, building capability, consistent standards and a one-team culture.
• Experience working in data mesh or hub-and-spoke data operating models.
• Good understanding of investment data, such as instruments, portfolios, positions and performance, with deeper asset management experience a strong advantage.
• Experience leading complex data platform migrations and the controlled retirement of legacy platforms while maintaining service continuity.

Responsibilities

• Shape a modern data platform.
• Own the design, build and optimisation of ingestion, transformation and data provisioning on our Snowflake-centric platform.
• Implement a medallion architecture, with clear standards for promoting data from raw to curated to consumption-ready layers.
• Set data engineering standards for ELT patterns, orchestration, data modelling, testing, DataOps, CI/CD for data pipelines and observability.
• Build reusable ingestion, transformation and consumption patterns that speed up access to new data for the business, whether through BI, APIs, data sharing or AI.
• Take a pragmatic, outcome-led approach, balancing the right data architecture with early business value.
• Deliver governed, trusted data products: make data cataloguing, data quality, lineage and data observability core parts of how every data product is built and run, rather than controls added after delivery.
• Include data contracts, metadata and certification standards in every data product, so each one is discoverable, trusted and auditable.
• Ensure data products and pipelines are secure and compliant by design, embedding identity and role-based access control, secrets management, encryption, data classification, retention and privacy controls into engineering standards.
• Build and lead a high-performing data engineering team: lead, inspire and mentor data engineers across the UK and India, and set the standard for how we deliver.
• Develop the team through regular coaching, clear career pathways and meaningful opportunities to build technical and leadership capability.
• Shift the team's focus from building individual pipelines to delivering reusable data products, underpinned by strong data modelling, data quality and lineage practices.
• Build AI-ready data and bring AI into data engineering: partner with Data Product, Analytics and AI teams to implement semantic models, ensuring business definitions and relationships are consistently represented in the engineered data products.
• Apply AI across data engineering, from data quality monitoring and anomaly detection to automated documentation and AI-assisted code, with appropriate human oversight.
• Simplify the estate and retire legacy platforms: lead the technical migration from legacy data platforms and point-to-point data feeds onto the strategic platform.
• Consolidate duplicated pipelines and fragmented data stores into a smaller set of trusted, reusable data products.
• Reduce technical debt and keep the data estate simple, supportable and cost-efficient.
• Build cost awareness into data engineering by designing efficient pipelines and data products and by optimising compute and storage costs as a core part of delivery.

Skills

Snowflake

Data platform

Medallion architecture

ELT patterns

Data governance

Data modelling

CI/CD for data pipelines

Data products

AI integration

Cloud security

Tools

dbt

Databricks

Job description

M&G is seeking a Head of Data Engineering to lead a growing team across the UK and India. You will own ingestion, transformation and delivery of data on a Snowflake-centric platform, moving from fragmented pipelines to a modern, governed data products architecture.

This leadership role requires hands-on expertise in medallion and lakehouse patterns, DataOps, CI/CD, and data governance. You will build scalable data products that support investment decisions, client reporting and AI use cases