Data Engineer Lead

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Role overview: 

Lead the engineering delivery and productionisation of the Data Intelligence Platform for FDSS and related data capabilities. The role owns the technical path from use-case prototypes and analytical experiments to secure, governed, scalable and supportable data products and platform services. 

The role you will play:

• Set the data engineering and platform delivery direction across FDSS data use cases. 
• Turn prototype pipelines, models and demonstrations into repeatable production services. 
• Coordinate data engineering, platform, analytics, ML, security, governance and operational disciplines around a single delivery roadmap. 

Primary responsibilities:

• Own the Data Intelligence Platform engineering strategy, target architecture, roadmap and productionisation standards. 
• Lead design and delivery of ingestion, event streaming, transformation, lakehouse, serving and analytical data products. 
• Establish engineering patterns for batch and low-latency data, APIs, feature pipelines and authorised data access. 
• Define and implement data quality, lineage, metadata, catalogue, master/reference data and reconciliation controls. 
• Embed CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, automated testing, observability, FinOps and secure configuration into the platform lifecycle. 
• Lead production readiness across resilience, scalability, backup, recovery, monitoring, support, data protection and service management. 
• Coordinate platform dependencies, environments, suppliers and interfaces with wider FDSS and ESCS services. 
• Set technical priorities, estimate delivery, manage engineering risks and mentor data engineers. 
• Support governance and stakeholder decisions with transparent measures of platform quality, readiness, performance and value. 

Required skills and capabilities: 

• Data engineering leadership and platform architecture 
• Cloud data platforms and lakehouse patterns 
• Batch, streaming and event-driven data pipelines 
• SQL, Python and distributed data processing 
• Data modelling, data products and semantic layers 
• Data quality, observability, lineage, metadata and cataloguing 
• Data governance, security, privacy and access control 
• MLOps and productionisation of analytical or AI services 
• CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code and automated data testing 
• Reliability engineering, FinOps and service transition 

Required experience: 

• Leadership of data engineering delivery for a production cloud data platform. 
• Experience taking prototypes, notebooks or analytical use cases through production engineering and operational acceptance. 
• Experience designing scalable ingestion, transformation and serving patterns. 
• Experience implementing data quality, governance, security and platform observability. 
• Experience coordinating product, analytics, engineering, infrastructure, security and operational stakeholders. 

Desired experience:

• Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, Azure data services, AWS data services or comparable platforms. 
• Data Intelligence Platform, digital supply chain, logistics or defence data use cases. 
• Event streaming, feature stores, MLOps or AI/ML platform engineering. 
• Migration of sensitive enterprise data and integration with operational systems. 
• Experience establishing a data platform team, engineering standards and reusable accelerators. 

Clearance Requirements:

• SC required to start
• SC required for the role

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Leidos UK! Join our team and discover a culture of collaboration, innovation, diversity, trust, caring management, communication transparency, work-life balance, and overall job satisfaction...

What we do for you:
At Leidos we are PASSIONATE about customer success, UNITED as a team and INSPIRED to make a difference. We offer meaningful and engaging careers, a collaborative culture, and support for your career goals, all while nurturing a healthy work-life balance.
We provide an employment package that attracts, develops and retains only the best in talent. Our reward scheme includes:
•    Contributory Pension Scheme
•    Private Medical Insurance
•    33 days Annual Leave (including public and privilege holidays)
•    Access to Flexible benefits (including life assurance, health schemes, gym memberships, annual buy and sell holidays and a cycle to work scheme)

•    Flexible Working Scheme

Commitment to Diversity:

We welcome applications from every part of the community and are committed to a truly diverse and inclusive culture.  We foster a sense of belonging, welcoming all perspectives and contributions, and providing equal access to opportunities and resources for everyone.  If you have a disability or need any reasonable adjustments during the application and selection stages please let us know, and we will respond in a way that best fits your needs.

Who We Are:

Leidos UK & EUROPE – we work to make the world safer, healthier, and more efficient through technology, engineering and science.

Leidos is a growing company delivering innovative technology and solutions focused on safeguarding critical capabilities and transformation in frontline services, our work in the United Kingdom includes addressing some of the most complex problems in defence, healthcare, government, safety and security, and transportation.

What Makes Us Different:

Purpose: you can use your passion and abilities at Leidos to keep the people you care about safe. We are at the forefront of machine learning, AI, cyber security and solutions. Using your skills in the technology frontline by helping to build a safer world.  You can inspire change.

Collaboration: having flexibility to do your job is one of our core benefits, enabling you to become part of our extraordinary team.  We have been empowering our people to work flexibly for years.  Whether you work from home, the office or on customer sites, we will give you the digital tools and the flexibility to work smarter and align your needs and ours.          

People: Leidos empowers people from every background to be themselves and gives you the tools to learn new skills by enabling growth whilst developing. We believe that extraordinary people need opportunities to grow, to be inspired and to inspire others. At Leidos, we invest in technical academies, career rotations and a career development plans that enhance your future.

If you're looking for comfort, keep scrolling. At Leidos, we outthink, outbuild, and outpace the status quo — because the mission demands it. We're not hiring followers. We're recruiting the ones who disrupt, provoke, and refuse to fail. Step 10 is ancient history. We're already at step 30 — and moving faster than anyone else dares.

Original Posting:

Pay Range:

The Leidos pay range for this job level is a general guideline only and not a guarantee of compensation or salary. Additional factors considered in extending an offer include (but are not limited to) responsibilities of the job, education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities, as well as internal equity, alignment with market data, applicable bargaining agreement (if any), or other law.