United Utilities
Lead Data Engineer (Databricks)
Get notified of more jobs like this · No spam, ever
How your CV stacks up
Upload your CV to see how well it fits this job role
?%
About Us
Lead Data Engineer (Databricks)
River Water Quality Programme
Warrington (Hybrid – 3 days onsite per week)
At United Utilities, we’re committed to protecting the environment that millions of people depend on every day. As part of our Digital Services team, you’ll play a pivotal role in one of our most important and high-impact initiatives: near real time monitoring of river water quality.
We’re looking for a Lead Data Engineer to take technical ownership of modern, scalable data platforms that turn complex environmental and telemetry data into trusted insights for regulators, scientists, and operational teams.
What You’ll Be Doing
As the Lead Data Engineer on our River Water Quality Programme, you’ll design, build, and optimise Databricks-based data pipelines that enable timely, reliable and well-governed data across the organisation.
You’ll:
- Design and develop scalable batch and streaming data pipelines using Databricks, Spark and Delta Lake
- Implement medallion architecture (bronze/silver/gold) to ensure data quality, lineage and efficient consumption
- Optimise Spark jobs and workflows to meet near real-time monitoring SLAs
- Build and maintain streaming pipelines using Structured Streaming and Delta Live Tables
- Ensure strong data governance, including schema enforcement, validation rules and ACID compliance
- Orchestrate and automate pipelines using Databricks Jobs, APIs or cloud-native schedulers
- Collaborate with data scientists, analysts and environmental specialists to deliver high-quality, well-documented datasets
- Monitor, troubleshoot and continuously improve production pipelines for reliability, performance and cost efficiency
- Champion best practices across CI/CD, testing, version control and documentation
Reasons to use Rodeo
Start with a chat, not a search bar
Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.
It searches the market for you
Every day your agent scans the market matching roles against what actually matters to you, not just keywords on a CV.
Only hits
No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
Act as a technical leader and mentor, raising standards across the data engineering community
Essential
What you’ll bring
- Deep expertise in Databricks (Spark / PySpark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Workflows)
- Strong experience building ETL/ELT pipelines, both batch and streaming
- Advanced Python and SQL skills
- Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS or GCP)
- Solid understanding of data modelling and modern architectures
- Strong knowledge of data governance, security and compliance
Get help with your application
Your very own career expert that helps elevate your application to the next level.
Desirable
- Experience with orchestration tools such as Airflow
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, Git workflows and automated testing
- Exposure to real-time, IoT or environmental telemetry data
Experience & Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering or a related discipline
- 5+ years’ experience in data engineering roles, including 3+ years with Databricks
- Proven ability to lead technically and mentor engineers
What You’ll Get
We believe in rewarding our people properly:
- Up to 10.5% annual bonus
- Outstanding pension – up to 21% combined contribution
- Private healthcare
- Share buy scheme
- Wellbeing benefits and support programmes
Other
Why United Utilities?
You’ll be working on data that truly matters — protecting rivers, supporting environmental compliance, and helping shape the future of sustainable water management across the North West.
If you’re passionate about modern data engineering, enjoy technical leadership, and want your work to have real-world environmental impact, we’d love to hear from you.
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London
Skills