Data Engineer Lead

Overview

Sword is a leading provider of business technology solutions within the Energy, Public and Finance Sectors, driving transformational change within our clients. We use proven technology, specialist teams and domain expertise to build solid technical foundations across platforms, data, and business applications. We have a passion for using technology to solve business problems, working in partnership with our clients to help in achieving their goals.

About the role:

This is an exciting opportunity for a senior data professional to take a pivotal leadership role within our growing Data & AI business unit.

As the Data Engineer Lead, you will report directly to the Data & AI Technical Director and play a major role in shaping our engineering capability, standards, and technical strategy. You will lead a team of Senior Data Engineers, provide hands‑on coaching, and deliver technical assurance across multiple client engagements to ensure high-quality, secure, and scalable data solutions.

The role offers the chance to work with the very latest Microsoft technologies, such as Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, Purview, and Microsoft Foundry, while influencing solution design, architectural decisions, and delivery excellence. You will work closely with clients across a range of industries, supporting discovery, design, and delivery, and you will also contribute to pre‑sales activity by joining client calls, shaping proposals, and advising on solution approaches.

This role provides the perfect blend of leadership, technical depth, innovation, and client interaction, offering substantial scope to make a lasting impact on both our clients and the direction of our Data Engineering service offerings.

• Lead, mentor, and develop Senior Data Engineers, promoting best practices and high-quality engineering delivery
• Provide technical direction, guidance, and oversight across all data engineering projects
• Deliver technical assurance by reviewing solution designs, pipelines, architectures, and implementation approaches
• Oversee the design and delivery of scalable, cloud-native data solutions using Azure technologies
• Ensure engineering teams follow best-practice patterns for ETL/ELT, data modelling, data lakes, governance, and optimisation
• Support the Data & AI Technical Director in shaping the engineering strategy, standards, and capability roadmap
• Act as a senior technical advisor to clients, translating business requirements into modern data engineering solutions
• Facilitate discovery sessions, workshops, and technical design reviews with client stakeholders
• Support the sales team by joining client calls, providing technical expertise, and contributing to solution shaping
• Participate in scoping, estimation, and the creation of technical content for proposals and bids
• Ensure all solutions meet governance, security, compliance, and data quality standards
• Promote strong engineering fundamentals including code quality, testing, automation, documentation, and CI/CD
• Identify delivery risks, propose mitigation strategies, and ensure predictable, high-quality project outcomes
• Collaborate with Data Architects, AI Specialists, and other cross-functional teams to design cohesive end-to-end solutions
• Keep the engineering team aligned with emerging technologies, tools, and cloud capabilities
• Identify opportunities to improve efficiency through automation, accelerators, and reusable components
• Contribute hands-on technical expertise when required to unblock teams or solve complex engineering challenges
• Engage in continuous improvement initiatives to advance engineering maturity and standardisation across the practice

• Deep expertise in Azure Data Platform components, including Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure SQL, Azure Synapse, Azure Data Factory, and Azure Databricks
• Strong hands‑on experience building end-to-end data pipelines using Azure-native ELT/ETL frameworks and modern orchestration patterns
• Advanced knowledge of Microsoft Fabric, including lake houses, warehouses, pipelines, notebooks, dataflows, and monitoring
• Ability to architect and oversee Fabric-powered data estate modernisation for analytics, BI, and AI…