Senior Data Engineer

12-month rolling (multi-year programme)

1 day/week - St Paul's, London

We're hiring a Senior & Lead Data Engineer to build a Databricks lakehouse platform in a high-performance, business-critical Front office Risk trading environment .

This is a hands-on engineering role focused on building and optimising large-scale distributed data systems .

This is a highly technical team operating at scale, we're looking for engineers with deep data engineering expertise, strong low-level Spark knowledge , and experience building high-performance systems using modern Databricks and AI-driven platforms.

This is working for a Front office Risk Data team, so you MUST have experience working closely with Front/middle office users and have good domain knowledge covering Market and credit Risk and derivatives

What you'll do

• Defining technical approach for migrating historic data from existing SQL server instances to Databricks then keeping that data flow on a daily/intraday basis.
• Building pipelines from bronze to silver/gold/platinum
• Curation of data products in the market risk, credit risk and historic market data domains.
• Build and optimise Spark pipelines on Databricks
• Develop a lakehouse platform (Medallion architecture)
• Own data modelling, architecture, and pipeline design
• Work with large-scale data (TB-PB)
• Drive performance, scalability, and reliability in production

What we're looking for

• Strong experience running Spark workloads in production
• Proven ability to optimise Spark at scale (Tb/PB datasets)
• Solid Python (Scala beneficial, not essential)
• Experience with data modelling and lakehouse architecture
• Ability to debug and improve performance in distributed systems

Important

• Must have recent, hands-on Spark experience
• Databricks strongly preferred (not essential if Spark depth is very strong)
• Experience supporting AI/ML or advanced analytics platforms is a big plus
• Experience in performance-critical environments

Not a fit if

• Primarily BI / reporting focused
• Spark used only at small scale or outside production
• No experience with performance optimisation in distributed systems

Bottom line

We're looking for engineers who can design, build, and optimise Spark-based systems at scale and operate effectively in a performance-critical environment from day one .