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Funding Circle is a fintech platform that uses data-driven technology to help UK small businesses access funding quickly. The company operates with the agility of a startup combined with the stability of a public company, and has generated £7.2bn for the UK economy.
The Data Platform team builds and operates the infrastructure that all data teams at Funding Circle depend on, including Snowflake, data ingestion (batch and streaming), orchestration, data contracts, and the Data Product Portal. The company is undergoing a significant transformation: migrating from Athena to Snowflake and adopting a federated "Data as a Product" model.
In this Technical Lead role, you will:
- Lead the technical direction of the Data Platform, translating target architecture into a clear, sequenced engineering plan and keeping the team aligned.
- Own technical quality across Snowflake infrastructure, RBAC, ingestion patterns, Airflow orchestration, CI/CD, observability, and cost controls.
- Make and document technical decisions using a formal decision-document process; escalate cross-domain decisions to the architecture review board.
- Mentor engineers, distribute knowledge to eliminate single points of failure, and establish a fast and thorough code review culture.
- Enable domain teams, Data Scientists, Analysts, and AI Agents to build effectively on the platform by defining standards, reusable patterns, and ensuring Data Platform reviews don't block downstream teams.
- Lead the technical side of the Athena-to-Snowflake migration, including source landing, reconciliation, cutover evidence, and legacy platform decommissioning.
- Partner with the Engineering Manager on operational excellence: on-call quality, alert tuning, incident follow-ups, runbooks, and disaster recovery.
- Collaborate with Security and Data Governance on platform controls.
- Manage vendor relationships, including support escalations and roadmap input.
- Communicate technical trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders and data leadership.
- Set and evolve standards for AI-assisted engineering (Claude, Copilot) to ensure safe and consistent use.
- Work closely with the Principal Engineer, who owns cross-domain architecture, to translate it into platform engineering plans and delivery.
The role is hybrid, based in London with 2 days per week in the office. Funding Circle offers a comprehensive benefits package including flexible benefit allowance, private medical and dental, health assessments, digital GP access, life assurance, share schemes, financial coaching, annual learning allowance, electric car and cycle-to-work schemes, season ticket loans, and award-winning parental leave policies.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years in Data & Analytics with proven experience as a Senior/Tech Lead setting architectural direction for other engineers
- Deep, hands-on knowledge of Snowflake, ideally including Iceberg/open table formats and RBAC
- Advanced SQL and Python skills; enterprise-grade dbt model development
- Experience designing end-to-end data pipelines combining batch, file-based, and streaming ingestion (Kafka/CDC) managed with Airflow orchestration
- Strong understanding of data security and governance, including PII handling and access control
- Strong infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD skills
- Track record of writing clear design documents, explaining technical risks to non-technical stakeholders, and making decisions under uncertainty
- Ability to architect custom AI solutions and smart automated systems that are safe, maintainable, and mission-aligned
- Ability to act as a technical bridge and mentor, training builders across the company to move from basic AI usage to sophisticated system creation
DESIRABLE SKILLS:
- Data contracts (ODCS/ODPS), data product portals, lineage tools
- Experience in a regulated financial services company
- Experience leading a migration or large platform change
- PySpark or other distributed processing experience
