Lead Data Engineer (Cloud)

Job Description

Job Title: Lead Data Engineer (Cloud)

Location: Preston – We offer a range of hybrid and flexible working arrangements – please speak to your recruiter about the options for this particular role

Salary: £55,000 depending on skills and experience

What you’ll be doing:

• Building and operating ingestion pipelines into the lakehouse
• Developing Spark transformation jobs and reusable pipeline patterns
• Orchestrating workflows in Airflow (raw > bronze > silver > gold)
• Implementing manifest-driven transformation using JSON configuration stored in MongoDB or CosmosDB
• Maintaining Delta Lake tables and trouble shoot pipeline reliability/performance

Your skills and experiences:

• Deep understanding of modern data engineering principles, data lifecycle, and enterprise-scale architecture.
• Strong knowledge of data governance, metadata management, and quality frameworks, with ability to enforce standards.
• Extensive experience managing and scaling data across hybrid environments (on-prem and cloud), particularly Azure and Databricks.

Benefits:

As well as a competitive pension scheme, BAE Systems also offers employee share plans, an extensive range of flexible discounted health, wellbeing and lifestyle benefits, including a green car scheme, private health plans and shopping discounts – you may also be eligible for an annual incentive.

The Data team:

This is an opportunity to join a new part of the business, undertaking a new piece of work, introducing new technology into the wider BAE Business. Joining from the ground up, this is a chance to make your mark and the role your own. This role will provide the opportunity to grow the role & your responsibility into a wider scope or even specialise within a specific area.

Why BAE Systems?

This is a place where you’ll be able to make a real difference. You’ll be part of an inclusive culture that values diversity of thought, rewards integrity, and merit, and where you’ll be empowered to fulfil your potential. We welcome people from all backgrounds and want to make sure that our recruitment processes are as inclusive as possible. If you have a disability or health condition (for example dyslexia, autism, an anxiety disorder etc.) that may affect your performance in certain assessment types, please speak to your recruiter about potential reasonable adjustments.

Please be aware that many roles at BAE Systems are subject to both security and export control restrictions. These restrictions mean that factors such as your nationality, any nationalities you may have previously held, and your place of birth can restrict the roles you are eligible to perform within the organisation. All applicants must as a minimum achieve Baseline Personnel Security Standard. Many roles also require higher levels of National Security Vetting where applicants must typically have 5 to 10 years of continuous residency in the UK depending on the vetting level required for the role, to allow for meaningful security vetting checks.

Closing Date: 3rd March 2026

We reserve the right to close this vacancy early if we receive sufficient applications for the role. Therefore, if you are interested, please submit your application as early as possible.

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