Data Engineer
Northampton
Ref: VA4362
#OFE
Benefits
Competitive salary plus performance related bonus
29 days holiday including public holidays plus additional days with service
Pension contributions
Referral bonus scheme
Enhanced parental leave
Enhanced sick pay
Wagestream-a Financial Wellbeing app giving you ultimate pay control! Get paid when you want, save monthly, enjoy shopping discounts, explore your benefits, and even connect with a financial coach.
Talk to us about flexible working
VIP Awards - colleague recognition scheme
Cycle to work scheme
Benefits App - virtual GP appointments, employee assistance programme (EAP), cycle to work, high street discounts, discounted vehicle maintenance & repairs and so much more!
Steer Academy provides accredited ongoing training - paid for by the business
Opportunities for career progression
About Us
Steer Automotive Group is the UK's largest independent accident repair group, with more than 200 sites and around 4,500 colleagues. We're investing in a modern data platform on Microsoft Fabric to replace an ageing reporting environment, and this is the first dedicated data engineering hire into our Group IT team.
Role Overview
Steer Automotive Group is investing in a modern data platform, built on Microsoft Fabric, to replace an ageing reporting environment that is close to capacity and increasingly fragile. As our first Lead Data Engineer, you will own that platform and its technical direction on Steer's behalf: setting how it is built, governed and run, and building the data engineering team around it.
The platform is being built in partnership with our data consultant. You will lead Steer's side of the architecture and design decisions, working collaboratively with their engineers, reviewing and challenging what is delivered, and making sure Steer can run it independently. You will stay hands-on where it matters while the team is small, but your focus is ownership: reliability, governance and long-term maintainability, not just delivery. As the build matures, the consultant will move to an advisory and managed-service role and you will take full accountability for the platform.
You will work closely with our established BI Analysts, who own reporting and dashboard delivery, and with colleagues across the business whose data requirements you will track and prioritise. As the Group grows through acquisition, you will also make sure newly acquired sites are brought onto the platform consistently.
Key Responsibilities
Platform Ownership & Technical Direction:
- Own the overall data platform and its technical direction on Steer's behalf, including Fabric capacity sizing, resource allocation, and FinOps/compute cost governance to ensure scalable, cost-effective performance across the group.
- Lead Steer's side of architecture and design decisions on the Fabric medallion build (Bronze / Silver / Gold) and the target dimensional model.
- Take accountability for platform reliability, governance and long-term maintainability, not just delivery.
- Make sure requirements from the business are captured, tracked, prioritised and managed through to delivery.
Delivery Partner Leadership:
- Work collaboratively with our data consultant's engineers, reviewing and constructively challenging their designs and deliverables.
- Make sure what is delivered is maintainable, documented and ready for Steer to operate independently, and lead the transition as the consultant moves to an advisory and managed-service role.
- Lead the build's quick-win workstream: incremental ingestion, refresh schedule optimisation, and workload isolation between engineering and reporting.
Engineering Oversight:
You will have exposure to, and be able to oversee, the engineering areas that future Senior Data Engineers will own. While the team is being built, you will be hands-on in several of them:
- Fabric pipelines, notebooks, Spark/PySpark, T-SQL and dbt.
- Bronze / Silver / Gold transformations and dimensional models.
- Ingestion pipelines from Steer's core source systems (including Autoflow, Eclipse, People, NetSuite and file-based sources), and resolution of day-to-day pipeline and refresh failures.
- Gold-layer data products for the BI Analysts, fit for reporting and consistent with the agreed KPI dictionary.
- Tenant and workspace administration.
- Automated monitoring, testing and alerting, operating within a defined incident process.
- Backup and disaster recovery.
- Deployment pipelines and infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform).
Data Governance, Security & DevOps:
- Establish and operationalise group data governance frameworks, classification standards, and access control policies (role-based and row-level security, Entra ID, service-principal authentication), removing single-person and personal-credential dependencies.
- Make sure data is handled in line with GDPR and Steer's information security policies.
- Own the data catalogue and lineage documentation (Microsoft Purview) as governance matures.
- Own Git-based CI/CD and Prod/Non-Prod environment separation, and lead the team in following best practice, including validation and review before changes reach production.
Acquisitions & Data Consistency:
- Oversee the onboarding of newly acquired sites onto the data platform.
- Maintain consistency of data and KPIs across entities, working with the BI Analysts and system owners.
- Lead the investigation of data quality issues traced back to source systems or transformation logic, working with system owners to fix them at source.
Leadership, Stakeholders & Roadmap:
Act as Steer's go-to technical expert for data and its voice in platform decisions.
Shape how the data function grows, defining future data roles and where additional engineers would add most value, then recruiting, leading and developing them.
Set engineering standards and lead by example on code review, documentation and best practice.
Drive pragmatic adoption of AI-assisted engineering tools and agentic workflows across the team, maintaining strict verification and review discipline to accelerate delivery.
Build strong working relationships across Group IT, finance and operational teams, translating business needs into data requirements and explaining technical trade-offs in plain language.
Feed delivery-informed perspective into roadmap and prioritisation discussions for future use cases (e.g. operational KPIs, advanced analytics).
Any Other Duties:
Undertake any other duties reasonably required by the business from time to time, commensurate with the seniority and scope of this role.
Key Skills
Leadership & Ownership:
- Technical leader who takes ownership of outcomes, covering reliability, governance and maintainability as well as delivery.
- Strong stakeholder management: able to prioritise competing business requirements and explain technical concepts to non-technical colleagues.
- Confident to challenge external consultants and suppliers constructively, holding delivery to Steer's standards.
- Sets clear standards and develops others, building a team around a platform from an early stage.
- Structured problem-solver who gets to the root cause of issues.
- Comfortable working autonomously in a small, lean team and operating in a build-from-scratch environment
Technical:
- Hands-on experience with Microsoft Fabric, or strong transferable experience with Azure Databricks, Synapse and Azure Data Factory.
- Broad working knowledge across ingestion, transformation, modelling, DevOps and platform administration, enough to oversee and review the work of other engineers.
- Confident with Spark/PySpark and/or T-SQL for data transformation at scale.
- Strong understanding of medallion (Bronze/Silver/Gold) architecture and dimensional data modelling.
- Working knowledge of data governance, access control, row-level security and GDPR.
- Understanding of Git-based CI/CD, deployment pipelines and infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform).
- Pragmatic use of AI-assisted development tools with review discipline; experience working with agentic functionality is an advantage.
- Familiarity with Power BI semantic models and DAX is an advantage, to collaborate closely with reporting analysts.
Qualifications and Experience
Essential:
- Significant hands-on data engineering experience (typically 7+ years), including production delivery in Microsoft Fabric or equivalent modern Azure stacks (Azure Databricks, Synapse, ADF), and time in a lead or senior technical role.
- Proven experience leading architecture and design decisions on a production data platform.
- Track record of owning production data platforms end-to-end, including reliability, operational support, and capacity and cost management.
- Strong Spark/PySpark and/or T-SQL skills, applied to production data pipelines.
- Experience designing medallion/dimensional data models.
- Working knowledge of data governance, access control and GDPR-aware data handling.
- Experience owning Git-based CI/CD and environment controls, including review and validation into production.
- Demonstrable stakeholder management, including prioritising requirements from non-technical colleagues.
Desirable:
- Experience leading, mentoring or line-managing data engineers.
- Experience working alongside external delivery partners or consultants, including taking ownership of what they have delivered.
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code (e.g. Terraform), automated monitoring and alerting, and backup and disaster recovery.
- Hands-on experience leveraging AI-assisted development and agentic tooling to accelerate data engineering delivery.
- Experience with Power BI semantic models and DAX.
- Microsoft DP-700 (Fabric Data Engineer Associate) or equivalent certification.
- Experience with dbt and Azure DevOps.
- Experience integrating data from acquired businesses, or working in a private-equity-backed, multi-site or acquisitive business.
- Background in automotive, retail, or another operationally intensive, multi-location sector.
Why Join Us?
- Be the first dedicated data engineer at the heart of a major platform investment.
- Learn Fabric, Spark and the governance model directly from specialist delivery engineers.
- Grow with the platform, with the chance to shape how Steer's data function develops, including future hires.
- Remote working, with occasional travel to our offices
If you are passionate about technology and dedicated to providing excellent support, apply today to join Steer Automotive Group as a Lead Data Engineer!
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Location
Hybrid
Department
IT Transformation
Job Title
Data Engineer
Salary
£65,000-£80,000
Experience
IT, Data Engineering, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Databricks or Azure Synapse
City
Hybrid
Country
United Kingdom