Lead Data Engineer / Senior Data Engineer - AWS, Snowflake, CI/CD

Location: Heathrow - 1-2 days per week onsite
Contract: Immediate start until December 2026, likely extension into 2027
Rate: Up to £630 per day all-inclusive - Inside IR35 / PAYE

Lead Data Engineer - AWS / Snowflake / Data & AI

We are seeking an experienced Lead Data Engineer / Senior Data Engineer to join a major airline's Data & AI team, providing hands-on technical leadership across a key data engineering delivery programme.

This role is ideal for a senior data engineer, lead software engineer or data engineering technical lead with strong AWS cloud engineering experience, modern software development practices and the ability to mentor engineers. Snowflake experience is highly desirable.

You will drive engineering best practice, improve data delivery processes and introduce scalable, reusable solutions using automation, CI/CD and modern DevOps methodologies. Experience or a strong interest in AI-assisted software development and engineering productivity is also beneficial.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead hands-on data engineering and software engineering delivery across the 2026 data workstream.

• Provide technical leadership, coaching and mentoring to data engineers and software engineers.

• Design and implement scalable, reliable and maintainable data engineering solutions on AWS.

• Apply cloud engineering best practices across data pipelines, data integration and data processing.

• Implement Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment processes.

• Promote DevOps, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), source control, Git workflows and release management best practices.

• Improve software quality through automated testing, unit testing, code reviews and test automation.

• Establish reusable engineering patterns, standards and frameworks to accelerate delivery.

• Support engineering capability development through pair programming, technical reviews and knowledge sharing.

• Explore AI-assisted development, generative AI and coding assistants to improve engineering productivity.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Strong experience as a Lead Data Engineer, Senior Data Engineer, Data Engineering Lead or Senior Software Engineer.

• Proven AWS cloud engineering experience, ideally across AWS data platforms and data engineering services.

• Strong understanding of data engineering, data pipelines, data integration and cloud-based data processing.

• Experience with CI/CD, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and DevOps practices.

• Proficiency in version control, automated testing, code quality and software release management.

• Demonstrable technical leadership, team mentoring and coaching experience.

• Ability to establish engineering standards and improve delivery practices within an existing team.

• Strong communication, collaboration and stakeholder management skills.

Desirable Experience

• Snowflake, cloud data warehousing and modern data platform delivery.

• AWS data services, cloud-native architecture and data pipeline orchestration.

• DataOps, automated deployment, Infrastructure as Code and release automation.

• Agile software development, code reviews, test-driven development and engineering quality assurance.

• AI-assisted software engineering, generative AI tools and coding assistants.

Contract Details

• Immediate start.

• Initial contract to December 2026, with a strong possibility of extension into 2027.

• Heathrow client site 1-2 days per week.