Lead Data Engineer
🔒 Confidential Employer
Posted 28 April 2026
LOCATION
Oxford
TYPE
Full-time
LEVEL
Mid-Senior level
CATEGORY
Data Engineering
This employer holds a UK Home Office sponsor license — sponsorship for this specific role is at the employer’s discretion
SKILLS
Spark
Kafka
Delta Lake
Python
SQL
PII handling
Document extraction
Mentoring junior engineers
FULL DESCRIPTION
Lead Data Engineer
Are you a hands-on leader who loves crafting clean architecture and mentoring engineers how to do the same? Do you enjoy building data pipelines that actually scale? Are you seeking a challenge as well as a mission that matters?
Join a health-focused data team working at the intersection of research, AI and engineering. You’ll be the right hand to the Head of Engineering, helping elevate the team’s technical maturity, drive best practices and build something meaningful.
What you’ll do:
- Lead and mentor a junior-heavy team of data engineers
- Build and scale robust pipelines using Spark, Kafka and Delta Lake
- Define test-driven, documented and repeatable engineering practices
- Work closely with AI, research and DevOps to deliver products and insights
- Handle sensitive health data (PII) and extract structured data from PDFs/docs
- Contribute to cost optimisation and smarter cloud usage
Where you’ll do it:
2 days a week in the office (1 day in Oxford and 1 day in London)
Tech you’ll use:
- Python, SQL, Spark, Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, Airflow, RabbitMQ, AWS, Delta Lake
You’ll thrive here if you:
- Believe in clean code, strong documentation and a test-first mindset
- Enjoy mentoring and levelling up junior devs
- Have worked with PII and/or document extraction challenges
If you want to play a pivotal role in a growing team with an opportunity to become the future Head of Data, then don’t miss this opportunity.
Click Apply or get in touch via: [contact hidden]
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