Lead Data Engineer

Role Purpose

Lead FEU's enterprise data engineering capability within the DGA Office, designing and evolving scalable, reliable and well-governed data solutions that support analytics across the FEU Group. The role is a hands-on capability lead who owns technical solution quality and engineering standards while partnering closely with IT Services. The role provides functional and technical leadership to a Data Engineer within the team but does not have administrative or performance-management authority over the position.

Key Accountabilities

• Technical Leadership & Architecture: Own data engineering design within the DGA remit; define patterns, standards and technical guardrails; assess existing architecture and recommend pragmatic improvements with IT Services.
• Data Integration & Platform Delivery: Lead design and development of ETL/ELT pipelines, transformations, integrations and analytics-ready datasets across Academic, HR, Finance and future domains.
• Data Modeling: Lead dimensional/analytical modeling, including grain, keys, relationships, historical handling and reusable enterprise structures.
• Quality & Reliability: Embed validation, reconciliation, testing, logging, monitoring, exception handling and performance optimization into engineering solutions.
• Governance Enablement: Translate approved business definitions and data-quality rules into technical implementation; maintain technical metadata and lineage.
• Functional & Delivery Leadership: Coordinate engineering work with the Head, review code/designs, resolve complex issues, provide technical guidance, coaching and knowledge sharing to teammates, and remain hands-on for high-complexity delivery.

Minimum Qualifications & Experience

• 6+ years relevant data engineering/database/warehouse experience, with demonstrated technical leadership; FEU HR may calibrate level based on market and internal grading.
• Advanced SQL and strong Python; strong ETL/ELT, relational database, data warehouse and dimensional modeling capability.
• Hands-on cloud data platform experience; Microsoft Fabric/Azure experience preferred where aligned with FEU architecture.
• Experience with Git/version control, testing, monitoring and structured development practices.
• Strong problem-solving, stakeholder communication, coaching and technical leadership capability.

Role Scope & Independence

• Manager-level capability leader and hands-on individual contributor.
• All DGA positions report administratively to the Head; this role exercises functional leadership rather than line-management authority.
• Accountable for the quality and outcomes of the capability/workstream, not only personal output.
• Expected to make decisions independently within approved enterprise strategy, governance and technology boundaries, and to escalate material cross-enterprise decisions to the Head.