Lead Data Engineer
United Kingdom (Remote)
Reporting to: Analytics Tech Lead
Remuneration: £85,000 – £95,000 per annum - plus £1000 working from home allowance
Contract Type:Permanent/Full time – 40 hours per week
Location:Home-based/various UK meeting locations as required
Closing Date for applications:
About Us:
Psychiatry UK is the UK’s leading provider of digital psychiatry services, working both privately and with the NHS to support children, teenagers and adults with expert, patient-centred care.
A career with Psychiatry UK allows you to expand your knowledge, enhance your skills, and gain valuable life experience—all while enjoying the flexibility of a remote full‑time role. As part of a leading online mental health service, you'll collaborate with innovative, forward‑thinking professionals in a dynamic, multidisciplinary team committed to making a real difference.
We are seeking a Lead Data Engineer to drive the design and delivery of a robust, scalable, and secure data platform that powers PUK’s analytics and data science initiatives. This role offers the perfect blend of hands‑on engineering and technical leadership, allowing you to shape our data architecture, mentor junior engineers, and collaborate closely with Analysts, Data Scientists, and Clinical/Operational teams.
In this role, you will play a pivotal part in enabling advanced analytics, machine learning, and predictive modelling, while ensuring our data platform adheres to the highest standards of governance, security, and performance.
This is a home‑based role (applicants must reside in the UK), though occasional travel may be required for face‑to‑face meetings at various locations within the UK.
As our Lead Data Engineer, you will:
- Lead the design, build, and optimisation of Psychiatry-UK’s cloud data platform to support analytics, reporting, and data science initiatives.
- Champion best practices in data engineering, including modular ELT design, CI/CD, data lineage, and testing frameworks.
- Collaborate with Technical Leads to evolve data architecture, ensuring scalability, security, and compliance (GDPR, NHS IG, ISO).
- Mentor and support data engineers and analysts, promoting a collaborative and learning‑oriented team culture.
- Contribute to strategic planning, technical roadmaps, and capability development within the Data, Analytics & Reporting function.
- Design, build, and maintain robust ETL/ELT pipelines to ingest, transform, and publish data from clinical, operational, financial, and external sources.
- Develop optimised SQL and Python workflows for data transformation, validation, and modelling.
- Implement data quality frameworks, monitoring dashboards, and alerting for data reliability and completeness.
- Manage cloud environments (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks, AWS, Azure), data orchestration tools (e.g., dbt, Airflow, Glue, ADF), and version control (Git).
- Oversee deployment automation, CI/CD processes, and environment management for production‑grade data pipelines.
- Partner with the Data Science team to deliver high‑quality, well‑structured datasets suitable for machine learning, NLP, and predictive analytics.
- Support data pipelines for feature engineering, model training, and model inference workflows.
- Collaborate on MLOps practices including model versioning, experiment tracking, and performance monitoring.
- Work closely with analysts and data scientists to ensure the data warehouse models support both descriptive and advanced analytics.
- Define and enforce data standards, metadata management, and access controls aligned with NHS and GDPR requirements.
- Maintain comprehensive documentation of schemas, data flows, transformations, and lineage using collaborative tools (e.g., Confluence).
To succeed as our Lead Data Engineer, you will have:
Strong analytical and problem‑solving abilities, applying a structured and pragmatic approach to overcome complex challenges. You possess excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to translate technical concepts into clear business understanding. Experience in mentoring junior engineers and fostering collaborative, high‑performing teams is essential. Additionally, you should have a genuine passion for leveraging data and technology to enhance healthcare delivery and improve patient outcomes.
- 5+ years of experience in data engineering or related roles, including 1–2 years in a senior or lead capacity.
- Advanced SQL skills, including performance tuning, CTEs, window functions, and data modelling.
- Strong Python expertise for data transformation, API integrations, and automation.
- Hands‑on experience with cloud data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, AWS Redshift, Azure SQL) and modern ELT/ETL tools (dbt, Glue, ADF, Airflow, etc.).
- Familiarity with data modelling approaches such as star schema, medallion architecture, and Data Vault.
- Understanding of data science workflows and integrating analytical models into production data environments.
- Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines, version control (Git), and Infrastructure‑as‑Code (IaC) principles.
Psychiatry UK: Supporting You
We want you to enjoy your work while feeling healthy, happy, and appreciated. That’s why we’ve created a benefits package designed with you in mind. You’ll have access to a range of wellbeing perks, including a Health Cash Plan, Well Hub Subscription, access to an Employee Assistance Programme, Annual Volunteering Day, Enhanced Sickness and Family Leave pay, Length of Service Bonus, Work from Home allowance and Pension options.
At Psychiatry UK, we care about what matters to you.
Recruitment Process
- Competency based interview(s)
If at any point you require any reasonable adjustments —such as additional time, assistive technology, or an alternative format for materials—please let us know. We are happy to accommodate your needs to ensure you have a fair and comfortable experience. Please feel free to reach out to us at to discuss any adjustments that would support you.
If this opportunity excites you, why not apply today?
*We review applications as they come in and may close the advert early if we receive a high volume of interest. To ensure you don’t miss out, we encourage you to submit your application as soon as possible.
