Lead Engineer - Data Platform

About The Team

The Data Platform Engineering team builds the platform that Tide's data producers and consumers rely on: backend engineers, data engineers, data scientists and, increasingly, AI agents. We own how data is produced, moved, stored, modelled, governed and served across the UK, EU and India, on GCP with BigQuery at the core.

Our mission is to make the right way the easy way: self-service capabilities with quality, security and cost controls built into the infrastructure, judged by whether teams choose to adopt them, not whether we mandate them.

About The Role

As Lead Engineer, Data Platform, you will be a hands-on individual contributor who leads platform initiatives within a clear technical direction set by the Data Infrastructure team. You will own small-medium platform initiatives and quarterly goals, taking them from design through to shipping and running them in production, and you will work closely with the Data Infrastructure Engineering Manager and the wider platform team.

In this role you will

• Design and deliver self-service paths so engineers can onboard new sources, datasets and pipelines without a ticket queue, with access, masking, quality and cost controls defined in infrastructure as code and CI/CD.
• Improve ingestion and transformation capabilities so data is fresher and more reliable, handling ordering, duplicates, late data, deletes, replay and backfill, and migrate pipelines without breaking downstream tables.
• Apply governance in what you build: residency, PII masking, least-privilege and just-in-time access, retention and erasure, and lineage.
• Set SLOs, freshness and quality checks, and alerting that tells on-call what matters.
• Find the main cost drivers in data platforms and pipelines, and add guardrails and attribution that teams can act on.
• Break work into phases that ship, with clear milestones, a migration path and a way to measure adoption.
• Use AI-assisted development to build and run the platform faster, and help prepare governed, well-described data that agents can use safely.
• Treat internal engineers as customers: write clear documentation and golden paths, and act on their feedback.
• Review designs and code for other engineers, and raise the bar for production-grade data and API work.

What We Are Looking For

Tide is looking for a hands-on Lead Engineer to deliver platform initiatives end to end and raise the quality of our data platform. We value what you have shipped and operated over job titles or team size. The ideal candidate will have:

• Independently designed, shipped and operated a meaningful platform or data infrastructure initiative used by internal engineering teams.
• Solid data engineering fundamentals: batch and streaming ingestion, CDC and event-driven patterns, data modelling, and correctness (idempotency, ordering, late data, backfill).
• Strong production engineering in Python and SQL, including building and operating APIs, pipelines or shared libraries.
• Practical infrastructure as code (Terraform or equivalent) and CI/CD for data and infrastructure, including IAM across environments.
• Working knowledge of data governance in practice: PII masking, access control, residency, retention and lineage.
• Observability for data pipelines: freshness and quality checks, SLOs, alert thresholds and incident response.
• The ability to justify technology choices against requirements, with an order-of-magnitude view of cost and capacity.
• Hands-on use of AI-assisted development with sound engineering judgement. Experience enabling AI tooling for engineering teams is highly preferred.
• Clear written and verbal communication, and the ability to explain trade-offs to engineers and non-engineers across teams and time zones.
• Nice to have: experience with global, decentralised teams, and in financial services or other regulated environments.

You do not need to match every tool below. Comparable cloud and data tooling experience is welcome.

OUR TECH STACK

Our data platform runs on GCP: BigQuery as our warehouse, Fivetran and event-driven ingestion, dbt, Apache Airflow (AWS MWAA), Looker, Atlan, Databricks, Terraform, GitHub, ConductorOne and Okta, Coralogix, and Claude for AI-assisted development. Our platform tooling is written mainly in Python, and our product teams build Java/Spring Boot services that publish events into the platform.

What You'll Get In Return

• Competitive Compensation – competitive salary
• Time Off – Generous annual leave on top of bank holidays.
• Parental Leave – Paid maternity, paternity, and adoption leave to support your family journey.
• Sabbatical – Extended unpaid and paid leave options after completing milestone years with Tide.
• Health Insurance – Private family insurance with additional OPD coverage and top-up options.
• Life & Accident Cover – Comprehensive accidental and life insurance protection.
• Mental Wellbeing – Access to therapy sessions, courses, meditations, and workshops.
• Volunteering & Development Days – Paid days annually for volunteering or personal growth.
• Learning & Development – Annual budget for books, courses, coaching, and more.
• WOO (Work Outside the Office) – Work from abroad for up to 90 days annually.
• Home Office Setup – Contribution towards setting up your home office
• Laptop Ownership – Keep your old laptop and get a new one when it's time for a replacement.
• Snacks & Meals – Office perks with snacks, coffee, tea, and lunch (location dependent).