Lead Data Engineer

United Kingdom Government; Salford; Hybrid; GBP 68,000 - 108,000; Full time

Job summary

HM Revenue and Customs is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to steer the engineering and operation of strategic data analytics platforms at national scale. The role focuses on high availability, performance, and cross-team collaboration to deliver enterprise data services across the organisation.

You will lead multiple product teams in agile DevOps, drive data security and governance, engage stakeholders, and mentor engineers while enabling self-service analytics and advanced reporting.

Qualifications

• Experience delivering and operating data platforms at scale.
• Expertise in ingestion, transformation, and modelling of data.
• Proficiency with ETL/ELT tooling and data quality.
• Experience with front-end tooling for reporting and analytics.
• Cloud experience with AWS/Azure and related services.
• Proven leadership of engineers/teams in agile/DevOps.
• Knowledge of security, governance and engineering best practices.
• Strong stakeholder engagement and translating tech to business.
• Willingness to obtain Security Check clearance.
• Desirable: EMR, Lambda, S3, etc.

Responsibilities

• Lead engineering and operation of data analytics platforms at national scale.
• Provide technical leadership across multiple product teams.
• Operate and improve enterprise data platforms and services.
• Ensure security controls and data governance are embedded.
• Engage with internal users to improve self-service data capabilities.
• Work with suppliers to design, build, and run data services at scale.
• Contribute to out-of-hours support and on-call rotas.
• Lead teams in capability and strategic direction.
• Collaborate with engineers, analysts, and stakeholders to evolve platforms for analytics.
• Drive continuous improvement in a DevOps environment.

Skills

Data platform leadership

Agile/DevOps leadership

Stakeholder engagement

Security governance

Cloud delivery (AWS/Azure)

Data ingestion/ETL/ELT

Tools

AWS

Azure

Databricks

Terraform

EMR

CloudWatch

IAM

KMS

S3

Job description

Salary: £68,000 - 108,000 per year

Requirements

• Strong experience delivering and operating data platforms at scale, including data ingestion, transformation, and modelling in complex environments.
• Technical expertise in data engineering approaches and technologies, including at least one of the following: distributed data platforms (e.g. Hadoop), relational or NoSQL databases, and data warehousing and data lake concepts.
• Experience building and maintaining data pipelines using ETL/ELT tooling, with a focus on performance, data quality, and reliability, incorporating virtualization.
• Experience with front-end user tooling such as reporting and dashboarding, advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI.
• Experience with AWS and Azure cloud-native products such as Glue, Dataflow, and Databricks.
• Demonstrable leadership experience, including leading engineers or technical teams and guiding delivery in an agile/DevOps environment.
• Ability to apply security, governance, and best-practice engineering standards within data platforms.
• Strong stakeholder engagement skills, including supporting business users and translating technical concepts into business outcomes.
• Willingness to acquire Security Check (SC) clearance.
• A cloud delivery background in AWS or Azure is desirable.
• Knowledge of EMR, Lambda, S3, RDS, EC2, EBS, EFS, Neptune, VPC, APIs, Terraform, Cloudwatch, IAM, and KMS is desirable.

Responsibilities

• Lead the engineering and operation of an area within our strategic data analytics platforms, ensuring high availability and performance at national scale.
• Provide technical leadership across multiple product-oriented delivery teams, supporting agile ways of working.
• Lead the operation, support, and continuous improvement of enterprise data platforms and services.
• Ensure appropriate security controls and data governance are embedded in platform services.
• Engage with internal users and stakeholders to improve self-service data capabilities.
• Work with suppliers and partners to design, build, and run data services at scale.
• Contribute to out-of-hours support and on-call rotas where required.
• Lead teams in capability and technical and strategic direction.
• Collaborate with engineers, analysts, architects, and business stakeholders to evolve platforms that support advanced analytics, reporting, and data science.
• Drive continuous improvement in a DevOps environment.

Technologies

• AI
• AWS
• Lambda
• Azure
• Cloud
• CloudWatch
• Databricks
• DevOps
• EC2
• ETL
• Embedded
• Hadoop
• IAM
• Support
• Machine Learning
• NoSQL
• Security
• Terraform
• LESS
• Network

More

We are HM Revenue and Customs and we are delivering one of the largest and most complex digital transformations in the UK public sector. We provide services to over 45 million individuals and 4.9 million businesses, underpinned by a modern, secure, and scalable data platform. This Lead Data Engineer role sits within Data Platform Services, where you will help shape and operate the platforms that enable analytics, insight, and decision making across HMRC. We offer flexible and hybrid working, generous leave, a Civil Service pension, family-friendly policies, personal support, coaching and development, and opportunities to grow through our Data Academy and Government Digital and Data profession pathways. Locations include Leeds, Manchester, Salford, and Telford, with office-based working expected for 60% of your time and home working available where the role allows.

last updated 37 week of 2026