Lead Data Engineer

Location:

Cardiff or London / Hybrid (1 day a week in the office) Who are we?

Sonovate is redefining the future of work through intelligent financial infrastructure. As a technology‑first fintech, we power the contingent workforce economy with scalable, automated funding and workflow solutions that help businesses grow with confidence. Our platform combines embedded finance, automation and seamless integrations to unlock efficiency, flexibility and growth for our customers.

Looking ahead, we’re focused on building long‑term value and creating structural advantage for businesses in a rapidly evolving world of work. Our ambition is to continually innovate, strengthen our foundations and explore new opportunities that make Sonovate an indispensable partner for organisations everywhere. If you’re motivated by shaping the future and delivering impact at scale, you’ll thrive here. Join us as we power the next generation of work.

The Lead Data Engineer is a T‑shaped engineer who owns the delivery of data products end to end, from initial acquisition through to analytical enablement. This includes internal reporting, customer‑facing features of our SaaS product, and AI‑driven applications. They provide subject matter expertise to all stakeholders and are trusted to make sound technical decisions independently.

The Lead Data Engineer produces exemplary, maintainable code while setting the standard for engineering practices across the team. They lead root cause analysis on complex platform issues, evaluate new tooling and platform capabilities, and actively coach peers on design patterns, domain knowledge, and engineering excellence. They have deep knowledge of the data platform and multiple business domains, and they anticipate analytics needs rather than waiting to be asked.

They will act as liaison between the data capability and the wider infrastructure team. They should be able to hold their own in discussions with Principal Software Engineers and the Head of IT infrastructure to persuade, influence and support wider technical infrastructure decisions where appropriate.

• Extensive experience integrating APIs and working with structured and semi‑structured data (e.g. JSON, Avro, XML), including both batch and streaming pipelines.
• Leads design on feature‑level complexity problems, breaking down medium‑sized engineering challenges independently.
• Coaches others on design patterns, domain knowledge, and engineering practices.
• Demonstrates a track record of taking data products from proof‑of‑concept through to production.
• Proficient with Git and Azure Dev Ops for source control and CI/CD orchestration; comfortable with a range of CI build tools and automation, with transferable skills across platforms.

• Fully capable in delivering data pipelines using Python, SQL, dbt, and tools like Azure Functions and Logic Apps.
• Able to evaluate new features of the Snowflake data platform (e.g. dynamic tables, zero‑copy clones) to determine how they could be leveraged and implemented.
• Demonstrates advanced knowledge of CI/CD pipelines and the underlying technologies; able to build new pipelines from scratch where needed.
• Familiar with infrastructure tooling such as Terraform and Ansible; able to contribute to provisioning and configuration tasks.
• Familiar with the broader Azure ecosystem including Azure AKS, Service Bus, Event Hubs, Azure SQL, CosmosDB, and Azure Search; able to provision and support relevant infrastructure as part of end‑to‑end data product delivery.
• Working knowledge of C# .NET Core is welcome but not essential, in an environment that is predominantly Python and SQL.

• Writes exemplary, high‑quality code adhering to shared best practices. Applies TDD and BDD practices, improving testing strategies by balancing coverage and business criticality.
• Refactors multi‑component systems to enhance simplicity and consistency.
• Works to meet and exceed operational excellence, performance efficiency, reliability, cost optimisation, and security requirements.
• Challenges poor practice constructively and drives a strong engineering culture within the team.

• Leads root cause…