Burns Sheehan
Lead Data Engineer
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Lead Data Engineer
Rate: £700 to £800
IR35: Outside IR35
Contract: 12 months
Location: Remote UK, with one engineering day per month near Tottenham Court Road, London
Engagement: Ltd company contractors only. The client will not engage contractors through umbrella companies.
About the Role
We are looking for a hands-on Lead Data Engineer to establish and shape a new data engineering squad for a major consumer technology business.
This is an opportunity for an experienced contract lead to take ownership of a genuinely greenfield and ambiguous problem space. The business works with a broad ecosystem of external partners across retail, travel, transport, and consumer services, each with different systems, technical capabilities, and approaches to exchanging data.
The goal is to create a more consistent and scalable way of onboarding partners, ingesting and exchanging data, and supporting secure data-sharing capabilities between organisations.
The Contract
The Data Exchange squad is being rebuilt and will initially be small. You will work closely with product, architecture, and engineering leadership to define how the team should operate and what the platform should become.
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You will be responsible for:
- Shaping the technical direction of the Data Exchange platform
- Designing and building Python-based data services
- Creating repeatable approaches to partner onboarding and integration
- Designing scalable data ingestion and exchange capabilities
- Supporting data-sharing use cases between external organisations
- Exploring capabilities such as data clean rooms
- Guiding engineers through architecture, design, and delivery decisions
- Working with product to turn loosely defined requirements into deliverable features
- Remaining hands-on across technical discovery, proof-of-concepts, and implementation
- Establishing engineering standards without over-engineering the solution
This is not a coordination-only leadership position. The squad will be lean, so you will need to contribute directly while acting as the first point of technical escalation for the engineers around you.
What We Are Looking For
- Strong commercial Python engineering experience
- A strong background in data platform or platform engineering
- Previous experience as a Lead Data Engineer, Tech Lead, Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, or hands-on Engineering Manager
- Experience designing data ingestion, integration, or data-sharing platforms
- Comfortable working through ambiguity and shaping new engineering teams
- Strong architecture and systems-design fundamentals
- Able to work effectively with product managers and non-technical stakeholders
- Experience guiding senior engineers while continuing to contribute hands-on
- A pragmatic approach to standardisation, scalability, and delivery
- Databricks experience would be useful, but is not essential
- Interest in AI-assisted engineering and agentic development workflows
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Experience using OpenSpec, specification-driven engineering, or other agentic frameworks would be a significant advantage. The organisation is actively investing in these ways of working and already has internal playbooks in place.
The Interview
The interview will be a practical technical discussion with senior data leadership and is likely to run slightly longer than one hour.
Please note that the client will only engage contractors operating through their own Ltd company. Applications from contractors requiring an umbrella company cannot be considered.
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