Lead Data Engineer (m/f/x)

We're TIP Group – a proud Great Place to Work® – and we're looking for a skilled and motivated Lead Data Engineer to join our team.

If you get energised by designing data platforms that actually move the business, love clean pipelines and clean code in equal measure, and want to lead a team where your technical voice genuinely shapes the architecture — keep reading, this could be your next move.

About TIP Data & Analytics TIP Data & Analytics drives meaningful impact through data and technology. We build resilient, scalable, and secure platforms, pipelines, and applications that power data-driven decision-making for internal and external stakeholders. Our agile team thrives on solving complex problems and building modern, cloud-native solutions. Reporting to the Group Data & Analytics Director, the Lead Data Engineer owns the design, development, and maintenance of our data engineering ecosystem — leading both the technical architecture and the standards behind it.

What You'll Be Doing ✔️ Lead design and delivery of scalable ETL/ELT pipelines on Databricks

✔️ Work within a medallion (bronze, silver, gold) architecture

✔️ Build metadata-driven, reusable pipeline frameworks

✔️ Manage and optimise Delta Lake and Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2

✔️ Set the bar for data quality, governance, and performance

✔️ Put monitoring, alerting, and observability in place to keep pipelines healthy

✔️ Build and maintain APIs and backend services in Python (FastAPI, Flask, or Django)

✔️ Ship reusable, production-grade components that other teams can build on

✔️ Support lightweight front-end tooling (React, Angular, or similar) where it's needed

✔️ Engineer our Azure-based lakehouse platform and associated services

✔️ Use Terraform and Azure DevOps for IaC, CI/CD, and deployment automation

✔️ Collaborate on integration with ERP and external systems (MS Dynamics a plus)

✔️ Mentor junior data engineers and grow the team's technical craft

✔️ Champion TDD, clean code, strong version control, and solid documentation

✔️ Partner with data scientists, analysts, and business teams to make data actionable

✔️ Stay close to emerging tools and trends, and bring the best of them in

✔️ Working closely with a supportive, hands-on team that values your input

What You'll Bring ✔️ Bachelor's in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Data Engineering, or related

✔️ 5+ years of hands-on data engineering experience

✔️ 1–2+ years in a lead or senior role

✔️ Strong Python — PySpark for pipelines, plus FastAPI, Flask, or Django

✔️ Solid SQL with a track record of optimising complex queries

✔️ Hands-on with Databricks, Delta Lake, and distributed data processing

✔️ Comfortable designing APIs and integration patterns (REST/GraphQL)

✔️ Experience with Azure Cloud, Terraform, and Azure DevOps

✔️ Nice-to-have: Apache Airflow or similar orchestration

✔️ Nice-to-have: Docker and Kubernetes

✔️ Nice-to-have: React, Angular, or Vue for data-facing tools

✔️ Nice-to-have: data modelling (Kimball, Data Vault, star/snowflake)

✔️ A natural leader who can guide, inspire, and grow engineers

✔️ Strong communicator across technical and business conversations

✔️ An engineering mindset focused on scalability, reusability, and maintainability

✔️ Collaborative and comfortable in an agile, fast-paced environment

✔️ Passionate about continuous learning and trying new things

✔️ A proactive mindset and a sense of ownership in your work

✔️ A good sense of humour – we work hard, but we like a laugh too

Why TIP? Because culture isn't a poster on the wall — it's someth