Lead Data Engineer
Rochdale (Hybrid)
Permanent
Role Overview
This organisation provides products that are used in safety-critical applications across sectors including oil & gas, civil engineering, aerospace, transport, utilities, marine/offshore and military, so precision and reliability are central to everything the business does. It's now looking for an experienced lead data engineer to build its first group data platform on Microsoft Fabric, bringing together data from across the business, replacing fragmented reporting, and giving colleagues reliable information to make decisions.
This is a hands-on role and the organisation's first senior data hire. There's no dedicated data team in place yet, so you'll take responsibility for both architecture and build, working directly with senior leaders and business teams to agree requirements and priorities, establish how data is managed, and help plan the future team. The role also includes developing conversational AI tools and a self-service BI layer that let colleagues query approved business data directly.
Key Responsibilities
- Own data requirements gathering across the group and maintain a single, prioritised backlog against delivery capacity
- Design, build and run the Microsoft Fabric platform, including pipelines, capacity, running costs and reliability
- Integrate core business systems (ERP, CRM, HR and other operational systems) across global business entities
- Put source control, CI/CD, automated testing, monitoring and alerting in place, and document standards and ways of working for the future team
- Set pragmatic data governance, security and quality standards proportionate to a business moving from low data maturity
- Agree common KPI definitions with business owners and build certified Power BI semantic models to support executive and operational reporting
- Set practical standards for data ownership, quality and security, including access controls, row-level security, classification and masking of sensitive data
- Deliver executive and operational reporting from the governed data layer
- Support key business users in analysing data from approved datasets, with appropriate training, access and support
- Prepare semantic models for AI use, with clear definitions, relationships and rules for interpreting data
Experience
- Microsoft Fabric experience, or transferable Azure Synapse or Databricks Lakehouse experience, including an understanding of medallion architecture
- Experience designing and building a data platform from scratch, with responsibility for architecture and delivery in a business with limited existing data capability
- Practical experience with ELT pipelines, dimensional modelling, source control and CI/CD