Lead Data Engineer — Scalable AI & Analytics (Flexible Remote)

Planday; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Pension

Health insurance

Employee share plan

Growth opportunities

Flexible remote work

Job summary

Planday, part of Xero, is seeking a Lead Engineer- Data in the United Kingdom. You will set architectural direction for the data platform, collaborate with Data, ML, Platform, and Product Engineering teams, and drive reliable ingestion, modelling, and orchestration to support data-driven features for customers globally.

You will design dbt models and semantic layers, own Dagster orchestration, onboard new data sources at scale, and advance self-serve analytics with agentic workflows and

Qualifications

• Deep Snowflake and dbt experience with modelling and semantic layers.
• Production experience with a pipeline orchestrator and observability.
• Cloud infra (Azure/AWS/GCP) and containerised workloads with IaC.

Responsibilities

• Set the architectural direction of the data platform for analytics, product engineering and AI/ML.
• Design dbt models, semantic layers, and quality standards with lineage.
• Own orchestration and observability in Dagster and onboard new sources at scale.
• Innovate self-serve and AI-enabled analytics and semantic models for BI.
• Build foundations for predictive and real-time use cases.
• Improve modelling standards, tooling, and development environments.
• Ensure platform reliability, performance, cost-efficiency and compliance.

Skills

Snowflake

dbt

Semantic modelling

Dagster

Airflow

Kubernetes

Terraform

SQL

Python

CI/CD

Data privacy

Tools

Dagster

Airflow

Terraform

Kubernetes

Job description

Planday, part of Xero, is seeking a Lead Engineer- Data in the United Kingdom. You will set architectural direction for the data platform, collaborate with Data, ML, Platform, and Product Engineering teams, and drive reliable ingestion, modelling, and orchestration to support data-driven features for customers globally.

You will design dbt models and semantic layers, own Dagster orchestration, onboard new data sources at scale, and advance self-serve analytics with agentic workflows and