Senior Data Engineer in London - Oliver James

Senior Data Engineer - Databricks | Hybrid London | £550/day Outside IR35 | 12 Months

A well-established transport/travel sector business is expanding its Data & Middleware function as part of a major analytics transformation, and is looking for a Senior Data Engineer to help build out its data platform and data products.

You'll join a growing team modernising a legacy estate onto a modern Event Sourcing Architecture, producing high-quality data for analytics via a flexible, platform-engineering-led approach. This is a genuine build role - shaping the technical direction of the platform, not just maintaining what's there.

The role:

• Design, build and operate high-quality data pipelines end-to-end
• Lead on data modelling, working closely with business analysts and engineers to structure data for clarity, integrity and efficiency
• Be involved across the full project lifecycle - planning through to delivery and run
• Maintain a strong security and data-protection focus throughout

What you'll need:

• 5+ years' progressive data engineering experience
• Strong Databricks and Spark expertise - platform internals, performance, DAB, Delta Lake, declarative pipelines
• Advanced Python, with solid software/DevOps practice (version control, unit testing, pipelines-as-code, CI/CD)
• Excellent data modelling skills, comfortable with tradeoffs across technical and organisational lines (Conway's Law)
• Advanced SQL, with experience querying data lakes/lakehouses
• Experience ingesting data via APIs, database connections or other methods
• Strong Agile delivery experience in a self-organising team
• Clear, persuasive communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders

Nice to have: platform engineering exposure, event sourcing/data modelling experience, ML/AI operationalisation on data platforms, PostgreSQL, dbt.

Details: Hybrid, 2-3 days/week in London. 12-month contract, £550/day outside IR35.