Senior Data Engineer

Job Overview:

As a Senior Data Engineer, you will be developing our configuration-driven data platform in Databricks, enabling non-engineers to define regulatory logic, and our Snowflake data warehouse, ensuring scalability, auditability, and fitness for client-facing regulatory use cases. You’ll be writing clean, maintainable, and well-tested code that follows best practices. As a senior member of the team, you will be providing technical leadership and mentorship to your colleagues.

You’ll join at a pivotal stage as we modernize our data infrastructure, migrating from Python scripts and MySQL to Databricks and Snowflake. Our systems power regulatory reporting for major financial institutions, requiring precision, traceability, and reliability.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and evolve our configuration-driven data framework in Databricks and our Snowflake warehouse.

• Coach and mentor junior engineers, and lead technical discussions and design reviews.

• Design, build, and optimize data pipelines using Databricks, Python and PySpark, with event-driven components (e.g. Kafka).

• Ensure pipelines are auditable, lineage-aware, idempotent, and resilient in regulated environments.

• Implement robust data quality controls including testing, validation, monitoring, and alerting.

• Drive performance optimization across Spark and Snowflake workloads.

• Partner with Product, Engineering, DevOps, and Regulatory teams to translate requirements into scalable technical designs.

• Contribute to the continuous improvement of our development processes and tools.

About You:

Must-Haves:

• 8+ years as a software engineer, including 5+ years in data engineering, owning system design and delivery.

• Experience designing auditable, reproducible data pipelines in regulated or high-integrity environments using Python and PySpark.

• Able to write and optimize complex SQL queries on large data sets.

• Strong data modelling and warehouse design fundamentals.

• Strong software engineering fundamentals: clean code, DRY, SOLID, automated testing, CI/CD, and observability, with a bias toward simple, maintainable solutions.

• Deep experience with a cloud lakehouse / data warehouse (Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, EMR, or similar). Our stack is Databricks and Snowflake; strong equivalent experience elsewhere transfers.

• Experience with a workflow orchestrator (e.g. Airflow, Dagster, or Databricks Workflows).

• Proven system and platform design judgment: you own architectural decisions and can defend the trade-offs. Greenfield, scaling, and migration work all count.

• Comfortable translating complex regulatory requirements into technical specifications.

• Able to own large, ambiguous initiatives and delivering them in incremental, shippable slices.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills, including translating between technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Nice-to-Haves:

• Experience with event-driven architecture patterns.

• Hands-on experience with AWS cloud infrastructure.

• Practical experience with infrastructure as code (e.g. Terraform).

• Experience modernizing legacy systems.

• FinTech, RegTech, or financial services background.

Why Join Us?

Work Across Disciplines: You won't be confined to a single track- you will develop a broader skillset across our capabilities and offerings.

Solve Problems that Matter: Work on complex challenges, where your thinking, analysis, and execution have real impact.

Flat, Visible, Collaborative: We keep the structure flat, so you can collaborate directly with senior leaders and experienced specialists. Your work is visible, your perspectives are valued, and you will see the impact of your contributions every day.

A Place for Builders: This is a great place for people who enjoy driving results and taking ownership. If you are driven to add value and help grow our business, you will enjoy a rewarding experience that recognises your contributions.

Perks & Benefits:

• Private Medical Insurance (via AXA): includes mental health, dental, vision, and private GP access

• Life Insurance - 4× salary (via Unum)

• Unum’s Help@Hand: includes GP access, medical second opinions, physiotherapy, lifestyle coaching, savings and discounts, mental health support, bereavement counselling, and cancer support services for you, your partner, and your child(ren)

• Salary sacrifice childcare and nursery scheme (via YellowNest)

• Employee Assistance Programme

• Enhanced parental leave (maternity & paternity)

• Professional qualification sponsorship

• Accelerated career progression based on readiness and performance, not tenure or time spent in role

• Holiday entitlement increases with tenure

• Flexible hours with core collaboration time

• Paid volunteering leave

• Gym & fitness discounts

• Bi-annual socials

• Office snacks and drinks

• Interest-based working groups to collaborate and innovate

Novatus’ Equal Opportunities Statement:

Novatus is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All employment decisions are made based on business needs, role requirements, and individual qualifications, without regard to race, age, religion or belief, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, socioeconomic background, disability, or any other characteristic protected under the Equality Act 2010.

We maintain a workplace culture that is inclusive, respectful, and supportive. Our recruitment and selection processes are designed to ensure fairness and consistency for all candidates.

Reasonable adjustments are available throughout the application and interview process, and candidates are encouraged to contact Human Resources to discuss any specific requirements.

This commitment is embedded in all aspects of our employment practices, including recruitment, compensation, professional development, promotion, and workplace conduct.

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