Lead Data Engineer

About the job

Since 2002, Quantium have combined the best of human and artificial intelligence to power possibilities for individuals, organisations and society.

Our solutions make sense of what has happened and what will, could or should be done to re-shape industries and societies around the needs of the people they serve.

As one of the world’s fully diversified data science and AI leaders we operate across every sector of the economy and we’re growing fast - with growth comes opportunity!

We’re passionate about building out our team of smart, fun, diverse and motivated people.

We combine a team of experts that spans data scientists, actuaries, statisticians, business analysts, strategy consultants, engineers, technologists, programmers, product developers, and futurists – all dedicated to harnessing the power of data to drive transformational outcomes for our clients.

We actively foster a culture where our people can stretch themselves to reach their full potential.

We also know that work has to work for you, and modern life is fast-paced and balance can be tricky. You want to work where you are respected and valued as an individual, not a number.

Quantium embraces a flexible and supportive environment dedicated to powering possibilities for our team members, clients and partners.

Role Summary

As a Lead Data Engineer you will be accountable for the enhancement, maintenance and support of the product on which your team is working, within your technology area.

You will be responsible for your own hands-on coding, ensuring the quality of your team’s output, representing your team in product-level forums and ensuring your team provides input to and aligns with the overall product road-map.

You will work with Engineers in other technology areas to define the overall technical direction for the product, with product owners and business stakeholders to shape the product's delivery road-map and with support teams to ensure its smooth operation.

You will also be responsible for line management of your team of Engineers, potentially across multiple locations, ensuring that they perform to the expected levels and that their career development is fully supported.

As a Lead Data Engineer you will be responsible for developing readable, maintainable and efficient code to realise user stories that deliver the product road-map. You will be accountable for coordinating Engineers and other stakeholders in breaking down large epics into collections of smaller stories / tasks and in implementing the overall functionality.

Key Responsibilities

• Produce Quality Code
• Code follows team standards, is structured to ensure readability and maintainability and goes through review smoothly, even for complex changes
• Designs respect best practices and are favourably reviewed by peers
• Critical paths through code are covered by appropriate tests
• High-level designs / architectures align to wider technical strategy, presenting reusable APIs where possible and minimizing system dependencies
• Data updates are monitored and complete within SLA
• Operate at a High Level of Productivity
• Estimates are consistently ‘challenging, but realistic’
• Most tasks are delivered within estimate
• Complex or larger tasks are delivered autonomously
• Squad Collaboration
• Sprint goals are consistently achieved
• Demonstrate commitment to continuous improvement of squad activities
• The product backlog is consistently well-groomed, with a responsible balance of new features and technical debt mitigation
• Other Engineers in the Squad feel supported in their development
  
  
  

Key activities

• Write polished code, aligned to team standards, including appropriate unit / integration tests
• Review code and test cases produced by others, to ensure changes satisfy the associated business requirement, follow best practices, and integrate with the existing code-base
• Provide constructive feedback to other team members on quality of code and test cases
• Collaborate with other Lead / Senior Engineers to produce high-level designs for larger pieces of work
• Validate technical designs and estimates produced by other team members
• Merge reviewed code into release branches, resolving any conflicts that arise, and periodically deploy updates to production and non-production environments
• Troubleshoot production problems and raise / prioritize bug tickets to resolve any issues
• Proactively monitor system health and act to report / resolve any issues
• Provide out of hours support for periodic ETL processes, ensuring SLAs are met
• Work with business stakeholders and other leads to define and estimate new epics
• Contribute to backlog refinement sessions, helping to break down each epic into a collection of smaller user stories that will deliver the overall feature
• Work closely with Product Owners to ensure the product backlog is prioritized to maximize business value and manage technical debt
• Contribute to work breakdown sessions to define the technical tasks required to implement each user story
• Contribute to sprint planning sessions, ensuring the team takes a 'realistic but challenging' amount of work into each sprint and each person is productively occupied
• Contribute to the team’s daily stand-up, highlighting any delays or impediments to progress and proposing mitigation for those issues
• Contribute to sprint review and sprint retro sessions, to maintain a culture of continuous improvement within the
• Coach / mentor more junior Engineers to support their continuing development
• Identify each direct reports' longer-term career objectives and, as far as possible, factor this into work assignments
• Conduct technical interviews as necessary to recruit new Engineers
  
  
  

Experience And Education Required

• 8+ years’ experience designing and implementing data warehousing solutions in a large commercial environment using Microsoft SQL Server (T-SQL, SSIS)
• Expertise in performance analysis, query and workload tuning, index optimization, etc.
• Confident working with very large, complex data-sets
• Solid understanding of database design and dimensional modelling principles (Kimball)
• Experience using Visual Studio 2013+ with SSDT
• 1+ years' experience developing at scale applications using Scala
• Proven experience manipulating large data-sets using Spark
• Good foundation in functional programming and data structures
• Values delivering high-quality, peer-reviewed, well-tested code
• Awareness of DevOps functions and appetite to contribute to CI / CD pipelines
• Knowledge of SSAS/MDX and cloud based data warehousing solutions is a plus
• Experience working with source control tools (GIT preferred) with good understanding of branching / merging strategies
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or a related discipline
• Comfortable working in a fast moving, agile development environment
• Excellent problem solving / analytical skills
• Good written / verbal communication skills
• Commercially aware, with the ability to work with a diverse range of stakeholders