Lead Data Engineer – GCP Pipelines & Client Delivery

fifty-five; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Being part of a multicultural, dynamic

Continuous training on digital tech

Private medical coverage

Transport for London travel card

Remote-friendly structure

25 days holiday plus holidays

Company pension plan

Sporting and social activities

Codecademy subscription

Job summary

fifty-five is seeking an experienced data platform engineer to design, build and operate scalable data pipelines on Google Cloud. You will own technical delivery on client accounts, guiding architecture decisions and ensuring high quality production systems.

You will combine SQL, Python and cloud engineering with strong testing, observability and data-quality controls, while using AI-assisted tools to accelerate work and maintain accountability.

Qualifications

• Excellent SQL and strong Python skills.
• Proven experience designing, building and operating reliable data pipelines, data models and cloud platforms (GCP preferred, AWS or Azure also welcome), with transformation and orchestration tooling such as dbt, Airflow or Dataform.
• Strong software engineering practices: Git-based workflows, code review, automated testing and CI/CD.
• Practical experience using AI-assisted engineering tools in day-to-day work, and the judgement to know when to rely on them and when to verify.
• Ability to break down ambiguous problems, see the business challenge behind a task, make well-reasoned decisions, and prototype and pitch ideas for clients.
• Excellent client-facing communication and confidence leading delivery independently: running several client projects at once.

Responsibilities

• Design, build and operate scalable data pipelines, data models and end-to-end solution architectures on GCP (BigQuery, Python, dbt, Airflow, Dataform), balancing reliability, maintainability, performance and cost.
• Own technical delivery on your projects and accounts, from scoping to production: making the design decisions, managing risks and dependencies, and communicating trade-offs clearly.
• Own the quality of what we deliver, with rigorous validation, automated testing, observability and data-quality controls built into production pipelines, and lead the diagnosis and fix when production issues come up.
• Use agentic coding tools such as Claude Code or Codex to build faster and improve testing, checking their output critically and staying accountable for the result. Share what works with the team as demos, docs and reusable patterns.
• Work with clients, consulting and data science teams to clarify requirements, challenge assumptions and turn business needs into pragmatic designs, and explain your reasoning to technical and non-technical people.
• Raise the team's engineering standards through design and code reviews, strong testing practices and clear documentation.

Skills

SQL

Python

Data pipelines

GCP

dbt

Airflow

Git workflows

CI/CD

AI tools

Tools

Dataform

Looker

Power BI

Job description

fifty-five is seeking an experienced data platform engineer to design, build and operate scalable data pipelines on Google Cloud. You will own technical delivery on client accounts, guiding architecture decisions and ensuring high quality production systems.

You will combine SQL, Python and cloud engineering with strong testing, observability and data-quality controls, while using AI-assisted tools to accelerate work and maintain accountability.