Senior Data Platform Lead — Azure Lakehouse & AI Readiness

Freshfields; Manchester; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Freshfields is seeking a data engineering leader to architect and deliver a cloud-first data platform at enterprise scale. You will guide a global, cross-functional team and drive AI-readiness, governance maturity and data democratisation across the firm.

You will own the day-to-day leadership of the Data Engineering team, shape engineering strategy, recruit and develop talent, and collaborate with senior stakeholders to maintain a reliable, scalable data platform.

Qualifications

• Proven leadership experience with coaching and growing teams.
• Experience delivering data lake/lakehouse architectures in an enterprise cloud.
• Hands-on with Databricks, Spark, PySpark, SQL and core Azure Data Services.

Responsibilities

• Design and maintain scalable data lake/lakehouse solutions in Azure.
• Develop and optimise batch and streaming ETL/ELT pipelines with modern tooling.
• Implement data governance and cataloguing using Collibra or Purview.
• Lead the Data Engineering team, including recruitment and performance management.
• Collaborate with Data Office to define engineering strategy and foster a high-performing culture.
• Monitor and tune data jobs for performance, scalability and cost.

Skills

Leadership

Data engineering

Team management

Communication

Tools

Azure Data Lake

Databricks

Spark

PySpark

SQL

Data Factory

dbt

Collibra

Purview

Job description

Freshfields is seeking a data engineering leader to architect and deliver a cloud-first data platform at enterprise scale. You will guide a global, cross-functional team and drive AI-readiness, governance maturity and data democratisation across the firm.

You will own the day-to-day leadership of the Data Engineering team, shape engineering strategy, recruit and develop talent, and collaborate with senior stakeholders to maintain a reliable, scalable data platform.