Senior Data Operations Specialist

Lloyds Banking Group; Bristol; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 79,000; Full time

Job summary

A major financial institution in the UK is seeking a Senior Data Operations Specialist to enhance its data services in a hybrid role based in Bristol. The ideal candidate will have over 7 years of experience in data operations and strong cloud skills with platforms like Azure and GCP. The position involves optimising data pipelines, applying SRE principles, and monitoring system performance. The organization offers a generous benefits package, including a pension contribution, performance bonuses, and personal development opportunities.

Benefits

Generous pension contribution up to 15%

Annual performance-related bonus

Share schemes including free shares

Discounted shopping benefits

30 days' holiday

Wellbeing initiatives

Qualifications

• Minimum 7+ years in data operations or engineering.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms.
• Proficiency in modern data tools and frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Operate and optimise cloud-native data pipelines.
• Apply SRE principles for system reliability.
• Monitor systems for health and data quality.

Skills

Cloud skills (Azure, AWS, GCP)

Data engineering knowledge

SRE principles

Automation experience

Data literacy

Tools

Python

Terraform

BigQuery

CloudSQL

Dynatrace

Job description

Senior Data Operations Specialist

JOB TITLE: Senior Data Operations Specialist

SALARY: £70,929 - £78,810

LOCATION: Bristol

HOURS: Full-time

WORKING PATTERN: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week, or 40% of our time, at our Bristol office

About this opportunity

Join the Personalised Experiences and Communications (PEC) Platform, a cornerstone of our Consumer Relationships Business Unit, where we're redefining how Lloyds Banking Group delivers personalised, data-driven customer experiences at scale. As a Senior Data Operations Specialist, you'll be embedded within a cross-functional product engineering team during a transformative phase of our cloud-first journey.

This is a pivotal opportunity to shape the operational backbone of our cloud-native data services and pipelines-ensuring they are robust, scalable, and optimised for high-volume, low-latency performance.

About us

Like the modern Britain we serve, we're evolving. Investing billions in our people, data and tech to transform the way we meet the ever-changing needs of our 26 million customers. We're growing with purpose. Join us on our journey and you will too

What you'll do

• Operate and optimise cloud-native data pipelines and services with a focus on performance, scalability, testability, and security.

• Apply Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) principles to enhance system reliability and operational efficiency.

• Proactively identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in high-throughput data environments.

• Leverage automation and orchestration tools to reduce manual effort and improve consistency.

• Ensure compliance with internal governance frameworks for build, release, and operations.

• Participate in design and implementation reviews, promoting best practices and continuous improvement.

• Read, understand, and write code in Python, Java, Spark, or Terraform to support automation and pipeline enhancements.

• Conduct holistic problem-solving across the stack-from data pipelines to CI/CD and DAG orchestration.

• Perform Level 1 triage for customer-impacting issues and elevate appropriately.

• Monitor live and pre-production systems for health and data quality; experience with building Dashboards with various dashboarding tools. Dynatrace and DSQL is beneficial.

This is not a hands-on data engineering role but requires strong technical acumen and operational leadership.

What you'll need

• Experience: Minimum 7+ years in data operations, data engineering, or Data SRE roles, with demonstrable experience running cloud-based, high-volume, low-latency data pipelines at scale.

• Cloud Skills: Advanced hands‑on experience with major cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP), including cloud-native data services, orchestration, monitoring, and automation. Proven experience in GCP-based data platforms, including BigQuery, Dataflow, CloudSQL, Spanner, Pub Sub, Cloud composer and GKE.

• Data Engineering: Proficient in modern data tools and frameworks for building, operating, and optimising ETL/ELT pipelines, streaming data, and batch processing.

• SRE & Automation: Strong understanding of SRE principles, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and operational automation.

• Data Literacy: Ability to design, develop, and apply data and analytics experience to drive effective decision-making and foster a data-driven culture.

• Values & Behaviours: Demonstrates innovation, challenges existing processes, adopts new technologies, inspires others, embraces diverse viewpoints, and maintains a growth learning mindset.

• (Bonus) Experience in monitoring and managing production AI/ML models.

About working for us

Our focus is to ensure we're inclusive every day, building an organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity in all its forms. We want our people to feel that they belong and can be their best, regardless of background, identity or culture. And it's why we especially welcome applications from under‑represented groups. We're disability confident. So if you'd like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%

• An annual performance‑related bonus

• Share schemes including free shares.

• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping.

• 30 days' holiday, with bank holidays on top

• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies

Ready for a career where you can have a positive impact as you learn, grow, and thrive? Apply today and find out more. Join our journey!