Data Engineering Lead

🌍 UK, Hybrid

⭐️ Our Perks

• Personalised Learning and Development Budget
• Hybrid working hours – Each team has their own Smart Working Charter that empowers you to do your work in the best way you can
• Technology – Your choice of Mac or Windows
• 1 Birthday day – it only happens once a year!
• 3 So Giving Days - spend these days giving back to your chosen cause
• Religious Celebrations Leave
• Mental Healthcare – Sessions with Unmind
• Enhanced Family Leave

Values-driven culture – we’re really proud of our culture.

So Energy

Who we are

So Energy was created in 2015 because we knew energy suppliers could be better. Since then, we’ve grown rapidly but sustainably, with 300,000 customers and over 450 Energists (what we call our people). But we’re not done. We’re on the road to a net zero future, and thanks to our partnership with ESB, we’re well on the way. We’re customer-centric, tech-led, and passionate about sustainability.

We want to do the best we can for our customers, each other, and our planet, so we’ve created a workplace that's encouraging, supportive, and offers the opportunity for growth. As a company, we live by six core values that guide everything we do:

• Clear
• Honest
• Ambitious
• Inquisitive
• Caring
• Sustainable

The Role

Data Engineering Lead at SO ENERGY

As a Data Engineering Lead, you will be responsible for leading the execution of our data engineering initiatives, ensuring alignment with our Data Platform Strategy. This role requires a strong balance between hands-on technical expertise and exceptional leadership skills. You will play a crucial role in shaping the data architecture, designing scalable data solutions, and driving best practices in data engineering. Additionally, you will lead and mentor a team of data engineers, fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous improvement. The role requires an inspiring leader who can drive best practices, shape the data engineering roadmap, and align technical solutions with business objectives.

Reporting into our Head of Data, Nethin Maharaj . 👋

What you’ll be getting up to:

Lead & Develop the Data Engineering Team

• Manage, mentor, and develop a team of data engineers, ensuring a strong technical culture.
• Drive career growth, performance management, and skills development within the team.
• Foster a high-performing, collaborative environment, encouraging knowledge sharing and innovation.

• Conduct regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and run our Data Engineering Forum to strengthen the team’s capabilities.

Define & Execute the Data Engineering Strategy

• Develop and execute the data engineering roadmap, ensuring alignment with business goals.
• Oversee the design and implementation of scalable, high-performance data pipelines and architectures.
• Champion best practices for data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and storage.
• Ensure the reliability, efficiency, and maintainability of our data platforms.
  

• Work closely with product and analytics teams to define data engineering priorities and execute against the roadmap.
  

• Ensure timely delivery of high-impact projects while maintaining scalability, security, and performance.
  

Drive Best Practices in Data Engineering

• Establish and enforce engineering processes and standards, including PR reviews, Data Quality assessments, CI/CD, Testing, and Observability.
• Optimize performance, cost, and scalability across our cloud-based data platforms.
• Ensure compliance with data security, governance, and regulatory requirements.
  

• Develop monitoring and alerting solutions for proactive data pipeline maintenance and incident prevention.
  

• Own the technical delivery of our Lakehouse following a Star Schema approach.

Stakeholder Collaboration & Business Impact

• Work closely with business stakeholders, including Product and Data Analysts to deliver data solutions that drive business value.
• Translate business requirements into scalable and sustainable data architectures.
• Act as a thought leader in data engineering, advocating for data-driven decision-making across the organisation.

Innovation & Continuous Improvement

• Evaluate and adopt new technologies and tools to enhance data engineering capabilities.
• Drive automation and efficiency improvements across data infrastructure and pipelines.
• Champion a culture of continuous learning, ensuring the team stays ahead of industry trends.

This role will be a great fit if:

Leadership & Management Skills:

• Proven experience in managing and mentoring data engineering teams, fostering a culture of learning and growth.
• Passion for nurturing talent, providing mentorship, career development, and performance management.

• Ability to provide technical guidance while empowering engineers to take ownership of their work.
• Demonstrated ability to drive technical strategies and align them with business priorities.

• Works closely with stakeholders to define the data engineering roadmap and align it with the organisation’s data strategy.

• Balances technical innovation with business priorities, ensuring that projects and team effort deliver tangible business value.

• Comfortable with providing status updates, delivery reporting, and shielding engineers from unnecessary admin overhead to maximise their focus and throughput.

• Experience with scaling teams, balancing hands-on contributions with coaching, pair programming, and contractor onboarding, with an eye on long-term team growth and sustainability.

Technical Expertise:

• Extensive experience designing and implementing scalable, metadata-driven data solutions, optimised for analytical consumption and operational robustness.

• Deep expertise in data modelling, specifically using star schema methodology, and building performant dimensional models to support high-velocity datasets.

• Strong experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including BigQuery, Dataflow, Composer (Apache Airflow), Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, DBT/Dataform, Datastream, and Cloud Run.

• Experience supporting agile, high-performing engineering teams in fluid delivery environments, with an emphasis on collaboration, adaptability, and team productivity.

• Track record of working alongside Staff and Principal Data Engineers to co-develop solution designs, align architectural decisions, and ensure technical consistency across the platform.

• Prior experience with AWS and its data ecosystem (e.g., Redshift, Glue, Lambda, Kinesis) is beneficial.

• Expertise in modern data pipeline architectures, covering both batch and real-time/streaming workloads, including event-driven patterns.

• Strong understanding of CI/CD, DevOps, and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, with a focus on automation and operational excellence.

• Experience applying best practices in data governance, data security, and compliance, particularly in regulated or data-sensitive industries.

• Background in on-prem SQL environments will be advantageous to support the migration of legacy platforms to the cloud.

• The ability to apply this experience on high-velocity datasets is essential

Research shows that some people are less likely to apply for a role unless they are 100% qualified. Your experience, skills and passion will set you apart so tell us about your achievements, irrespective of whether they are personal or work-related, tell us about your journey, and about what you learnt.

So, if this role excites you, don’t let our role description hold you back, get applying!

Hiring Process

1. Talent Screening - Member of Talent Team
2. Hiring Manager interview - Head of Data and Data Staff Engineer
3. Technical Interview - Senior Engineering Manager and Engineering Manager
4. Culture interview - Tech Director and People Partner

Support – If you have a medical condition or an individual need for an adjustment to our process, and you believe this may affect your ability to be at your best – please let us know so we can talk about how we can best support you and make any adjustments that may be needed.

Our Values

We look for people who share our values and can add to our culture. Values are shared beliefs that guide our decision-making, culture is how we function as a group and how we live our values as individuals.

Clear - The energy industry can be pretty complex so we strive to provide clear communication to our customers and colleagues

Honest - Transparency is key, Whether that's providing clear bills to our customers or trusting our staff to do the right thing.

Ambitious - All of us are ambitious about the future of So Energy and what we can contribute to it.

Inquisitive - We are also questioning the Status Quo to see if there is a better way to do things for our customers

Caring - We care about the work we are doing, our customers and our colleagues
Sustainable - As a renewable energy company we are providing sustainable products but we also care about sustainable careers. That's why learning and continuous development is so important to us.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging

At So Energy, we’re committed to cultivating an environment that promotes diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. We are a global community and we believe our unique qualities should be celebrated as they are critical to our innovation. It’s essential to us that you bring your authentic self to work every single day, no matter your age, ethnicity, religion, citizenship, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, caring responsibilities, neurodiversity, or otherwise. Inclusion isn’t just an initiative at So Energy. We strive to embed it not just into our values but throughout our entire culture.