Lead Engineer- Data

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

Our Purpose

Planday from Xero is a leading digital solution that uncomplicates everyday scheduling and workforce management by making it easier for businesses and shift workers around the world to communicate, collaborate, and get work done.

Our Purpose

Planday from Xero is a leading digital solution that uncomplicates everyday scheduling and workforce management by making it easier for businesses and shift workers around the world to communicate, collaborate, and get work done.

Powered by a community of local industry experts, Planday provides a best-in-class digital platform that is easy to use, accurate, secure, and compliant with local needs and standards. From payroll and accounting to POS and reporting, its open API and tech ecosystem is scalable to fit shifting business needs and to build an engaged, flexible workforce.

Founded in 2004, Planday is headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark and supports over 400,000 users across Europe, Australia and the US. Planday was acquired by Xero in 2021.

How You’ll Make An Impact

As our Lead Engineer- Data, you will set the architectural direction of the data platform that enables both the decisions we make internally and the data-driven features our customers rely on. Working with the Data, ML, Platform, and Product Engineering teams, you will keep ingestion, modelling, and orchestration dependable, and define the modelling, testing, and documentation standards the data function depends on. You will innovate on how people work with data, building the agentic tooling and semantic modelling that let teams across Planday work from trusted data with confidence.

What You’ll Do

• Set the architectural direction of our data platform so it serves analytics, product engineering, and AI/ML from one coherent design, collaborating with Platform and ML engineering on shared infrastructure.
• Design the dbt models, semantic layer, and quality standards the data function depends on, with the validation and lineage to make them trustworthy downstream.
• Own orchestration and observability in Dagster, and onboarding new sources in a way that scales.
• Innovate on self-serve and AI-enabled analytics, from semantic models and agentic workflows to our BI layer.
• Build the historical and low-latency foundations that make predictive and real-time use cases possible.
• Introduce better modelling standards, tooling, and development environments.
• Keep the platform reliable, performant, cost-effective, and compliant.

Success looks like

• Architecture that holds up as we scale and as new use cases emerge, and that other engineers follow as a pattern.
• Analysts ship faster and more efficiently because your tooling & standards remove friction.
• A drop in repeat requests to the data team, as stakeholders answer their own questions through agentic workflows.
• ML and product teams have the historical and real-time data they need, without bespoke workarounds.
• Strong working relationships with the Data, ML, and Platform teams.

What You’ll Bring With You

• Deep, hands-on Snowflake and dbt experience: modelling, semantic layers, agents & skills, testing, performance and cost tuning.
• Production experience with a pipeline orchestrator, ideally Dagster (or similar Airflow, Prefect), including dependent workloads, partial failures, and observability.
• Modern cloud infrastructure (Azure/AWS/GCP) and Kubernetes experience deploying and operating containerised workloads, plus infrastructure as code (Terraform).
• Strong SQL & Python for pipelines, services, and automation.
• Software engineering discipline across CI/CD, testing, and code review.
• The ability to turn technical trade-offs into clear narratives that help stakeholders decide and trust the work.
• Experience operating data systems, including incident response, cost, and data privacy practices.

At Planday, we offer you

• Benefits like pension, health insurance, inclusive support for new parents and generous vacation
• On top of your annual base salary, you are offered to be part of an Employee Share Plan
• Growth and progression opportunities – we want you to grow with us
• Flexible remote work
• Strong social culture with lots of team and company activities
• Meaningful work – everyone at Planday contributes to improving the lives of shift workers around the globe
• Healthy work-life balance and autonomous approach to work. We trust in you and your abilities

Finally, our offices are not just workplaces (although they are pretty nice and well-located, we have to say!). Plandayers are open and welcoming and at Planday, everyone has the freedom and support to show their true self at work.

At Planday, we firmly believe that diversity and inclusion are the cornerstones of innovation and a vibrant workplace culture. As an equal opportunity employer, we strive to create an equitable experience for all candidates throughout the process. Please let us know if you need any reasonable adjustments during the application or interview process.