This range is provided by Harnham. Your actual pay will be based on your skills and experience — talk with your recruiter to learn more.

Base pay range

Are you a data leader ready to shape the future of a modern data platform? We’re working with a fast-growing, well-funded scale-up that’s transforming the insurance industry, and they’re looking for a Head of Data Engineering to lead and grow their high-impact team.

This is a hands-on leadership role, perfect for someone who combines deep technical expertise with the ability to inspire and develop a talented data engineering team.

Why this role?

• Own and evolve the end-to-end data architecture, ensuring scalability, resilience, and data privacy.
• Lead and mentor a growing team of Data Engineers, embedding best practices and fostering innovation.
• Collaborate with leaders in Engineering, Data Science, Analytics, and Product to shape the company’s data strategy.
• Hybrid model: 1+ day a week in central London, with flexibility the rest of the time.
• Join a business with £200m+ funding, tens of millions of customers, and ambitious growth plans.

What you’ll be doing:

• Defining and executing the data engineering roadmap.
• Building and optimising ETL/ELT pipelines, data models, and real-time frameworks.
• Driving adoption of DevOps, CI/CD, and Infrastructure-as-Code for data workflows.
• Leading on platform innovation, re-architecture, and adoption of emerging tools.
• Partnering with stakeholders to ensure the data platform supports analytics, ML, and business intelligence needs.
• Balancing technical excellence with pragmatic delivery to meet business goals.

What we’re looking for:

• 5+ years’ experience as a Data Engineer, with proven ability to design and operate scalable data platforms.
• 2+ years’ experience leading teams as a Technical Lead or Data Engineering Manager.
• Strong expertise with modern stacks — Python, SQL, Snowflake, Spark, Airflow, dbt, AWS (S3, Terraform, Docker).
• Deep knowledge of data architecture, pipelines, governance, and observability.
• Excellent communicator with strong stakeholder engagement skills.
• Bonus: Experience with Data Mesh, Kubernetes, or real-time streaming (Kafka, Kinesis).

Benefits:

• Salary up to £130,000.
• Private medical insurance, company share options, and generous holiday allowance.
• Hybrid working (1+ day per week in London).
• Flexible working contribution (for travel or personal development).
• Wellbeing benefits and career development support.
• The chance to lead a team and platform with direct business impact.