Lead Data Engineer

Evolution Money Ltd; Manchester; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A financial services provider in Manchester seeks a Lead Data Engineer to design and lead the data ecosystem. You will manage a data team, optimize data architectures on Microsoft Azure, and drive data-driven decision-making. Ideal candidates have strong SQL knowledge and experience in cloud environments. Competitive salary up to £90,000 is offered.

Benefits

Up to 25 days’ annual leave + Bank Holidays

Your birthday off

Healthcare cash plan

Contributory pensions scheme

Long Service Awards

Cycle to work scheme

Life Assurance

Qualifications

• Experience in troubleshooting both on-premises and cloud issues.
• Excellent understanding of SQL Server architecture and T-SQL.
• Experience with data storage technologies.

Responsibilities

• Define and build data warehouse and reporting solutions.
• Manage daily operations of the data team.
• Lead and mentor a team of data engineers.

Skills

Troubleshooting cloud problems

SQL Server architecture

T-SQL queries

Data integration pipelines

Analytical skills

Tools

Azure

Power BI

Cosmos DB

MySQL

Job description

Job Title: Lead Data Engineer

Company: Evolution Money

Location: Manchester City Centre

Job Type: Full-time

Basic Salary: Up to £90,000 (Based on experience)

About Us

Evolution Money is a Certified B Corp with a social purpose. At Evolution Money, our mission is to redefine financial inclusion by providing bespoke lending solutions to UK homeowners. We are committed to empowering individuals and fostering long-term financial well-being. Through innovative and purpose-driven approaches, we aim to challenge traditional norms and create a pathway for those who might be overlooked by conventional financial institutions.

The Role

Evolution Money is giving you the chance to work with new cutting-edge technology maintaining your competitive advantage. Our vision is to enable the most effective data-driven decision to carry out meaningful insight to improve efficiency and recognise opportunities. You will be supporting and working alongside internal teams (Risk, MI and Operations) and our customers to visualise the potential of the data and how it can be used effectively.

We are a business committed to delivering analytics, insights, and data products that power our strategy and operations. We believe in clean architecture, scalable systems, and using the latest tooling to stay ahead. We are seeking a Lead Data Engineer to help design, build, and lead our data ecosystem on Microsoft Azure. You will be reporting to the Head of Engineering & Data.

Key Responsibilities

• Defining and building data warehouse and reporting solutions.
• Managing day to day operations of the data / reporting team.
• Write consultancy level reports to be consumed by technical and non-technical audiences.
• Chair daily standups and sprint ceremonies, distributing and overseeing the team’s delivery of objectives and requests.
• Create high level documentation to be interpreted and understood by technical and non-technical audiences.
• Explain technical concepts and the underlying principles to solutions during customer engagements.
• Prioritise and effectively manage your time amongst several concurrent projects.
• Refine and automate regular processes, track issues, and document changes.
• Support scheduled maintenance and deployment release activities after hours.
• Define and own the overall data architecture roadmap, ensuring it’s aligned with business strategy, compliance, and scalability.
• Design, build, and maintain data pipelines, ETL/ELT workflows, data warehouses, data lakes, and real-time streaming where needed.
• Leverage Azure Fabric (and associated Azure data services: Synapse, Data Factory, Databricks, Purview, etc.) to build performant, observable, and secure data platforms.
• Lead and mentor a team of data engineers & analytics engineers: setting coding standards, architectural reviews, best practices, peer code reviews.
• Ensure data governance, data quality, lineage, security and compliance are built into all data solutions.
• Understand business, data and reporting requirements by collaborating closely with projects / product, engineering, operations, analytics/BI teams and non-technical teams to understand requirements, deliver data products, and embed data-driven decision-making.
• Optimise for cost, performance, operations: monitoring, alerting, scaling, capacity planning.
• Stay up to date with newest features and capabilities in Cloud technologies (Fabric, Synapse, Data Lake) and drive adoption and best use.
• Provide technical leadership in estimation, technical debt, documentation, and trade-off decision.

Qualifications (minimum)

• Experience of troubleshooting problems both on-premises and in the cloud.
• Monitor database performance to avoid bottlenecks and critical conditions to ensure continued delivery of service.
• Excellent understanding of the SQL Server architecture.
• Excellent understanding of T-SQL queries, stored procedures, user-defined functions, views, indexes, and developer code associated with the database.
• Excellent analytical & problem-solving skills, identifying root causes and offering solutions.
• Azure, azure DevOps, SQL platform, T-SQL, Power BI, MySQL, Cosmos DB.
• Building and improving Data Architecture or modern data platforms.
• Experience with data storage technologies such as data lakes, data warehouse, and traditional SQL databases.
• Data Warehouse and Data Modelling Design (snowflake, star schema etc.)
• Data lake development using big data technologies or cloud native solutions.
• Complex Data integration pipelines with varied types and sources of data (direct integration, API based, ftp transfer).

Qualifications (Desirable)

• PowerShell scripting experience.
• Crystal Reporting.
• Alternative Databases (PostgreSQL, MongoDB).
• Google Analytics, BigQuery.
• Experience of high availability and disaster recovery implementations and maintenance.
• Experience managing and troubleshooting Windows Server.
• A natural desire to continue developing skills and helping customers to modernise their systems as appropriate.

What You’ll Get Back

• Up to 25 days’ annual leave + Bank Holidays
• Your birthday off, every year!
• A healthcare cash plan
• A contributory pensions scheme, matched up to 5%
• Long Service Awards
• Cycle to work scheme
• Life Assurance

Company Culture

Join us on our journey to redefine financial inclusivity. As we continue to evolve, so do the possibilities for those we serve. Our goal is not just to provide loans but to architect a future where financial empowerment is a reality for everyone. At Evolution Money, we value creativity, innovation, and a collaborative spirit. Our team is dedicated to delivering exceptional results and creating a positive impact in the financial services industry. We believe in fostering a work environment that encourages growth, learning, and teamwork.

We are committed to encouraging equality, diversity and inclusion and aim to create a working environment where every employee is respected. We will provide fairness, and respect to all our prospective employees, and all hiring decisions are based on merit.

We aim to ensure that no job applicant is placed at a disadvantage by practices or requirements which disproportionately disadvantage protected groups, and which are not justified by the demands of the role.

Everyone is welcome at Evolution Money! We are proud in creating an inclusive and diverse culture in our Evo Team community. We want to ensure that you feel comfortable and can give your best throughout the recruitment process. We encourage applications from all backgrounds and communities, and we are more than happy to discuss any reasonable adjustments that you may require.

Evolution Money is a Disability Confident Committed employer. We offer interview to anyone with disability who meets the minimum criteria for the role.