Lead Data Engineer

Lead Data Engineer £73,000
- £83,000 per annum Folkestone Hybrid Initial 8-month FTC (potential to go perm) As Lead Data Engineer, youll play a pivotal role in shaping how Saga Travel uses data to make better decisions, understand our customers and deliver exceptional experiences across our Holidays and Cruise businesses. Youll join our Data & Analytics team at an exciting point in our data journey, helping to build a new, integrated data platform that brings together two legacy estates on a single, governed Snowflake platform. This is a genuine opportunity to build something from the ground up from ingestion to transformation and then serving. Youll be developing the engineering capability, setting the standards and ultimately taking ownership of the platform as it evolves. Working closely with our implementation partner and Saga Groups data engineering and architecture teams, youll combine hands-on engineering with technical leadership and the development of our engineering capability. Youll also lead and support a Data Engineer, helping them grow while creating a pragmatic, high-performing engineering culture. And this is just the beginning. As the platform matures, youll help us unlock the next generation of data capability, including AI-enabled tools and natural language access to trusted, governed data for our business users. This role requires you to be working from our Folkestone office a minimum of 3 times a week. We have designated office space for colleagues in our Travel business, allowing us to collaborate and share success as a function.

Package Description At Saga we recognise that our people make us special. We believe our colleagues deserve rewards for the excellence they demonstrate every single day, that's why we have put together an amazing benefits package for all colleagues. BENEFITS AVAILABLE FOR THIS ROLE: 25 days holiday + bank holidays Option to purchase additional leave
- 5 extra days Pension scheme matched up to 10% Company performance related annual bonus
- Up to 5% Life assurance policy on joining us, 4 x salary Wellbeing programme Colleague discounts including family discounts on cruises, holidays and insurance Range of reductions and offers from leading retailers, travel groups and entertainment companies Enhanced maternity and paternity leave Grandparents leave Income protection Access to Saga Academy, our bespoke learning platform Main Responsibilities As our Lead Data Engineer, you will act as the senior technical resource on the Travel Data Warehouse build, working alongside the implementation partner consultants, taking on delivery ownership as the partner engagement tapers Other accountabilities include: Leading the Saga Travel data engineering team, supporting professional development Designing, building and testing dbt models across the intermediate and mart layers of the Travel Snowflake platform, re-implementing documented business logic reverse-engineered from the two legacy estates Owning the Travel DW stack end-to-end: repository structure, model and naming standards, materialisation policy, test discipline, documentation, code review and promotion between development, test and production environments Working on with project team to build and then take ownership of the CI/CD pipeline so that every change is built and tested automatically before it reaches production Owning orchestration of the Travel transformation layer and the operational interface with the Saga Group ingestion framework, including the agreed handover contract and the handling of late or failed loads Establishing monitoring, alerting and incident response for the nightly build so that failures are detected, triaged and fixed Making data quality testing a routine part of the build, including source freshness checks, schema and referential tests, and reconciliation against legacy outputs during parallel running Implementing data masking on Saga Travel objects in Snowflake, mirroring the Group data protection taxonomy, and own those policies on Travel-owned objects Monitoring and managing Snowflake consumption, tagging workloads so that platform cost is reported and controlled Working with business SMEs and data analysts to translate agreed business definitions into implemented tested models Building the conformed Travel dimensions and the unified trading view that bring the two Travel estates together Supporting decommissioning of the legacy Holidays and Cruise platforms once migrated, including cutover planning, verification and rollback contingency Maintaining clear technical documentation and runbooks so that the platform is supportable by more than one person

The Ideal Candidate Youll have proven experience in data engineering with demonstrable hands-on experience designing, building and operating production data pipelines in Snowflake. Skills and experience required include: Solid leadership experience working with a modern cloud data platform (must have some direct Snowfla