About the Role
The Lead Data Engineer will technically drive and shape Vida Bank's data utilization for commercial success. This role involves integrating diverse data sources across departments, delivering insights for daily decisions and strategic planning, and leading a small team of engineers by prioritizing work, developing standards, and providing mentorship.
Responsibilities
- Own the design and implementation of physical data models, dimensional models, and semantic models for operational, analytical, and regulatory reporting, ensuring alignment with enterprise data architecture standards.
- Own the design, build, testing, and documentation of data pipelines, integrating data from source systems into the data lake and transforming it for use in the data warehouse and reporting layers.
- Set and maintain engineering standards, patterns, and guardrails for data development, ensuring solutions are reliable, secure, maintainable, and aligned with Vida’s architecture principles.
- Lead and support a small team of data engineers, helping to prioritize work, remove blockers, review technical outputs, and build team capability through coaching and mentoring.
- Work with business stakeholders to understand data needs, translate them into clear technical requirements, and deliver trusted datasets, reports, and insights that support decision-making.
- Improve data quality and control standards, ensuring key data outputs are accurate, traceable, and fit for operational, commercial, and regulatory use.
- Manage technical relationships with internal teams and external suppliers, ensuring delivery is joined up, dependencies are clear, and outcomes are achieved to agreed standards.
- Support the ongoing maturity of Vida’s data platform, identifying opportunities to simplify processes, improve automation, and increase resilience across the data estate.
Requirements
- Strong hands-on experience designing, building, testing, and supporting data pipelines in a modern cloud data environment.
- Good working knowledge of Microsoft data technologies, including Azure Data Factory, Azure data services, SQL Server, Power BI, and related tooling.
- Strong SQL capability, including data extraction, transformation, performance tuning, and troubleshooting.
- Experience building reliable data warehouse, data lake, or reporting solutions that support operational, commercial, or regulatory reporting.
- Good understanding of data modelling, data quality controls, documentation, and testing standards.
- Ability to remain hands-on while leading technical delivery, setting standards, and reviewing the work of others.
- Experience leading, coaching, or mentoring data engineers or analysts in a delivery-focused environment.
- Confident working with business stakeholders to understand requirements and translate them into practical data solutions.
- Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain technical topics clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Experience working in financial services or another regulated environment is desirable.
- Familiarity with governance, control, and audit expectations for business-critical data is desirable.
- Experience with Python, C#, automation, or software engineering practices is desirable.
- Experience working with Microsoft Fabric or a comparable lakehouse platform, including data pipelines, semantic models, and Power BI reporting, is desirable.
Location
- London
- Newcastle
- Skipton
- Remote (various locations across the UK)
Work Type
- Hybrid
Benefits
- Comprehensive benefits package to support employees’ professional and personal needs.
About the Company
- Vida Bank provides competitive savings products through Vida Savings and specialist mortgage solutions through Vida Homeloans.
- Our mortgage business supports Buy to Let (BTL) and residential borrowers (ROO) who find themselves underserved elsewhere.
- Our mortgage customers range from Buy to Let investors, to the self-employed and customers with multiple jobs.
- Our savings proposition is delivered online via our website, and is focussed on providing savers with fair, transparent and competitive rates.
- Our typical customers are active savers, who tend to look beyond their current account provider for savings accounts.
- Our business model and strategy are underpinned by our core purpose to ‘Help More People Find a Place to call Home’.
- We are here to help the under-served, especially those with more nuanced personal circumstances or borrowing needs who are not able to access a mortgage from a mainstream mortgage lender.
- Working exclusively with intermediary partners, we combine cutting-edge technology with skilled and caring underwriting expertise to solve complex customer problems.
- As a fully regulated UK based bank with ambitious growth aspirations, we recognise the importance of having a clearly articulated culture strategy and the need to actively manage how it embeds in the business together with the behaviours which exemplify it.
- As a recognised Best Companies Top 100 mid-sized company to work for in the UK and a finalist at the Financial Reporter Women’s Recognition Awards, we take pride in our diverse workforce, championing both ethic and gender diversity through our EDI commitments.
- Having met the target set by being a member of the HM Treasury Women in Finance Charter we have 50% of senior management roles filled by women.
- With offices in London, Newcastle and Skipton, we bring our teams together regularly to collaborate and empower our colleagues to have more choice around when and where they work on the days they are not in the office, with colleagues working remotely in various locations across the UK.
- We are proud to have built a culture founded on an ethos of caring, and that sits at the heart of our Vida Values, driving the way we run our business, support our customers and other stakeholders on a daily basis.
- We genuinely care about delivering the right outcomes for all our stakeholders who we consider through the cultural framework as our customers, colleagues, company and communities that we operate in.
- By Joining Vida you will have a sense of belonging in what is a diverse and collaborative environment, where you will be empowered to take responsibility for driving delivery.
- We embrace a diversity of backgrounds and experiences in our people, in the deeply held belief that better outcomes are achieved for customers when our colleagues are better placed to empathise with and understand their unique circumstances.
- From application to interview, we place inclusion at the heart of all we do.
- Our values are well established and recognised throughout our organisation. They provide a frame of reference for the behaviours expected from our colleagues every day.
- We find ways to break old conventions, especially those which cause exclusion or customer harm.
- We look for these qualities when hiring new talent into the organisation, and they underpin our approach to personal development and performance management for all our people.
- At the heart of this is the fact we care about our Customers, Our Colleagues and our Communities.
- We are: Visionary - We innovate and break old habits, thinking big and pushing boundaries together as one team
- Inclusive - We value each other’s differences and work to see people for who they really are
- Dynamic - We are flexible and fast, cutting through complexity and never accepting second best
- Authentic - We are honest and genuine, what you see is what you get
