Lead Data Engineer, Cloud Data Platform

The-Very-Group; Liverpool; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible, hybrid working

£1000 flexible benefits allowance

30 days holiday + bank holidays

LinkedIn Learning access

Bonus potential

Up to 25% discount on Very.co.uk

Matched pension up to 6%

Job summary

The Very Group in the United Kingdom seeks a hands-on Principal Data Engineer to lead data enablement and guide the evolution of our data platform. You will partner with Engineering Managers, Product Managers and senior engineers to solve complex problems and raise engineering standards across initiatives.

You will stay hands-on, mentoring teams and influencing technology choices while driving performance, reliability and cost optimisation for data services used by millions of Very customers.

Qualifications

• Experience building and supporting production data solutions.
• Strong knowledge of AWS cloud services, including S3, EKS, Lambda, SNS, EventBridge, and IAM.
• Strong coding skills in Python and SQL; exposure to Java or Scala beneficial.
• Experience with data lakes, data warehouses, Lakehouse technologies, or enterprise data platforms.
• Experience working with version control, CI/CD, and modern engineering practices.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership across multiple teams and initiatives.
• Design scalable, resilient, and secure data architectures.
• Build and evolve cloud-native data platforms and services.
• Lead the design and implementation of complex data engineering solutions.
• Drive improvements in performance, scalability, reliability, and cost optimisation.
• Set engineering standards through code reviews, reusable patterns, and best practices.
• Support engineers through coaching, mentoring, and technical leadership.
• Collaborate with Product, Platform, and Architecture teams to align technical direction with business priorities.
• Lead investigations into complex production issues and drive long-term improvements.
• Identify technical risks and opportunities, helping to shape the future roadmap of the platform.

Skills

AWS

Python

SQL

Java/Scala (beneficial)

Iceberg

Starburst

Teradata

HVR

Data architectures

CI/CD

Version control

Mentoring

Tools

Iceberg

Starburst

Teradata

HVR

Job description

The Very Group in the United Kingdom seeks a hands-on Principal Data Engineer to lead data enablement and guide the evolution of our data platform. You will partner with Engineering Managers, Product Managers and senior engineers to solve complex problems and raise engineering standards across initiatives.

You will stay hands-on, mentoring teams and influencing technology choices while driving performance, reliability and cost optimisation for data services used by millions of Very customers.