Lead Data Engineer

Responsibilities

• Leading the Saga Travel data engineering team, supporting professional development
• Designing, building and testing dbt models across the intermediate and mart layers of the Travel Snowflake platform, re-implementing documented business logic reverse-engineered from the two legacy estates
• Owning the Travel DW stack end-to-end: repository structure, model and naming standards, materialisation policy, test discipline, documentation, code review and promotion between development, test and production environments
• Working on with project team to build and then take ownership of the CI/CD pipeline so that every change is built and tested automatically before it reaches production
• Owning orchestration of the Travel transformation layer and the operational interface with the Saga Group ingestion framework, including the agreed handover contract and the handling of late or failed loads
• Establishing monitoring, alerting and incident response for the nightly build so that failures are detected, triaged and fixed
• Making data quality testing a routine part of the build, including source freshness checks, schema and referential tests, and reconciliation against legacy outputs during parallel running
• Implementing data masking on Saga Travel objects in Snowflake, mirroring the Group data protection taxonomy, and own those policies on Travel-owned objects
• Monitoring and managing Snowflake consumption, tagging workloads so that platform cost is reported and controlled
• Working with business SMEs and data analysts to translate agreed business definitions into implemented tested models
• Building the conformed Travel dimensions and the unified trading view that bring the two Travel estates together
• Supporting decommissioning of the legacy Holidays and Cruise platforms once migrated, including cutover planning, verification and rollback contingency
• Maintaining clear technical documentation and runbooks so that the platform is supportable by more than one person

You'll have proven experience in data engineering with demonstrable hands‑on experience designing, building and operating production data pipelines in Snowflake.

• Solid leadership experience working with a modern cloud data platform (must have some direct Snowflake exposure to be able to hit the ground running)
• Dbt modelling experience, or the demonstrable capability and willingness to own that learning quickly, alongside a commitment to continuous professional development
• Advanced SQL, including complex transformation logic, data modelling and query performance optimisation
• Strong dimensional modelling knowledge: facts, dimensions, conformed dimensions and slowly changing dimensions
• Hands‑on engineering credibility, with the judgement to know when to build, when to simplify, and when to stop
• Proven people leadership: setting direction, giving feedback, and developing engineers
• Strong stakeholder and relationship management skills across technical and non-technical audiences
• Able to explain technical trade‑offs, and their cost and risk implications, to senior stakeholders
• Confident holding a technical position with third‑party suppliers and Group colleagues, constructively

As Lead Data Engineer, you'll play a pivotal role in shaping how Saga Travel uses data to make better decisions, understand our customers and deliver exceptional experiences across our Holidays and Cruise businesses.

You’ll join our Data & Analytics team at an exciting point in our data journey, helping to build a new, integrated data platform that brings together two legacy estates on a single, governed Snowflake platform. This is a genuine opportunity to build something from the ground up from ingestion to transformation and then serving. You'll be…