Lead Data Engineer - Snowflake Travel Platform Ownership

SAGA PLC; Sandgate; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

25 days holiday

Pension 10%

Annual bonus Up to 5%

Life assurance 4x salary

Wellbeing programme

Staff discounts

Job summary

Saga PLC is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to shape a unified data platform for the Saga Travel estates. You will lead the data engineering team, own Snowflake pipelines from ingestion to serving, and drive governance, security and performance across two legacy platforms.

You will design, build and test dbt models, implement CI/CD, manage data quality and masking, and collaborate with SMEs and third‑party suppliers to deliver reliable, scalable data capabilities for Holidays and Cruise businesses.

Qualifications

• Proven leadership experience in a modern cloud data platform.
• Direct Snowflake exposure to hit the ground running.
• Experience with dbt modelling or demonstrated capability to learn quickly.
• Advanced SQL skills including complex transformations and performance tuning.
• Strong dimensional modelling knowledge: facts, dimensions, conformed dimensions and SCDs.
• Proven both people leadership and ability to mentor engineers.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Saga Travel data engineering team and drive professional development.
• Design, build and test dbt models across Snowflake’s intermediate and mart layers.
• Own the Travel DW stack end-to-end: structure, standards, tests, documentation, reviews and promotions.
• Build and own CI/CD pipelines to ensure automated testing before production.
• Own orchestration of the Travel transformation layer and integration with ingestion framework.
• Establish monitoring, alerting and incident response for nightly builds and data quality checks.

Skills

Leadership

Snowflake exposure

Dbt modelling

Advanced SQL

Dimensional modelling

Stakeholder management

Third‑party coordination

Data governance

Education

Bachelor's degree in data/IT field

Tools

Snowflake

dbt

SQL

Job description

Saga PLC is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to shape a unified data platform for the Saga Travel estates. You will lead the data engineering team, own Snowflake pipelines from ingestion to serving, and drive governance, security and performance across two legacy platforms.

You will design, build and test dbt models, implement CI/CD, manage data quality and masking, and collaborate with SMEs and third‑party suppliers to deliver reliable, scalable data capabilities for Holidays and Cruise businesses.