Lead Data Engineer

Job Type:

Build a brilliant future with Hiscox
 

About Hiscox Re & ILS

Hiscox Re & ILS is located in Bermuda and London and underwrites reinsurance risks from around the world on behalf of our own and other people’s capital. The team of over 100 smart, enthusiastic individuals are committed to providing top quality service to brokers and clients across a broad range of reinsurance products. Our approach is simple; match the best underwriting risk against globally diversified capital. Our proactive, product-led underwriting approach is complemented by a commitment to world class service and purpose-built analytics and systems. We know our people are our biggest asset so finding and retaining the best talent is critical to achieving our vision.

Role Overview

The Lead Data Engineer is a strong, dynamic, and hands-on leader within the extended RE&ILS Tech Leadership Team, accountable for leading expert data engineers and managing, architecting, and building cloud-based and on-premise data solutions to support our data strategy.

You will co-lead, nurture, and grow the professional Data Engineering Chapter with the Head of Data and other Data Managers, ensuring the delivery of secure, scalable, and cost-effective and resilient data processing and analytical systems and the trusted (and easy to discover and consume) data products.

This role requires the ability to balance strategic technical direction - championing AI Code Generation and driving "everything as code" and DevOps maturity - with the people leadership necessary to mentor and retain highly skilled data engineering experts.

This is likely to be your first managerial role and the first time you have had one or more direct reports – having previously been a Senior Data Engineer yourself. In this role you will be responsible for the management of a 1 to 4 junior and mid-level Hiscox data engineers and possibly some Partner resources too. You will be expected to help attract and retain the best talent; supporting their career progression and ensuring they are highly engaged, find the work fulfilling, and are empowered to rapidly deliver value to the business. As this is likely to be your first managerial role you will be supported and guided by other Data Leaders – Head of Data and Data Engineering Managers.

Key Responsibilities

1. Chapter Leadership & Talent Management

• People Management: Lead, help recruit, mentor, coach, and nurture the junior and mid-level Data Engineers in your value stream, ensuring we retain and grow our talent including both Hiscox FTE and Partner colleagues. You are expected to have at least 5 years of Data Engineering experience – so you know what good performance looks like – in terms of behaviours and technical expertise.
• Help to Inspire chapter members to be curious, embrace new ideas, and nurture psychological safety to help build a high-performance culture. You will manage at least one to two Hiscox engineers and some partner engineers. You will be expected to manage their performance with relevant PDRs and help to calibrate their overall performance ratings with other people managers in the team. You will work with the Head of Data to help tailor the training needs to suit each individual and ensure they have the opportunity to grow and progress in their chosen career paths.
• Culture & Development: Cultivate a collaborative, engaged, and fulfilled team culture. Provide technical leadership, career guidance, and direction, actively promoting shared learning and best practices across the wider Hiscox Data focused communities of Practice.
• Best Practice: Ensure chapter members work using best practices in the cloud, including DevOps principles and "everything as code," ensuring consistency and simplicity in all solutions.
• Best Practice: Ensure the chapter adheres to best practices in data engineering and complex analytics, ensuring the way we solve solutions is consistent and through extensive reuse we improve our ability to deliver value to the business at pace.
• Mentoring: Mentor and educate others in the various data processing technologies, encouraging the team to continually learn new technologies and techniques – especially supporting the adoption of AI Code generation tools that could significantly accelerate our ability to deploy value.

2. Technical Architecture & Delivery Excellence

• Hands-On Architecture: Be a dynamic, hands-on contributor, immediately involved in architecting and building new data solutions or products and supporting initial Proofs of Concept (PoCs) using cloud-based technologies (Azure, Snowflake, DataIku, GCP, AWS agnostic). Ensuring our solutions consider data privacy, lineage and governance by design. It is likely you will be a technical lead in a specific squad within a specific value stream.
• Data Product and Pipeline Ownership: Own the process of setting up the appropriate tools and technologies to securely process data and create trusted data products —from ingestion, cleansing, transformation, and enrichment, to the final delivery of accurate products that can be consumed for analysis, models and reporting.
• Delivery Mindset: Focus on delivering value incrementally to the business, avoiding excessive complexity and ensuring solutions are always appropriate and not overly engineered. Prototype, fail rapidly, and iterate to successful delivery.
• Collaboration: Ensure the chapter effectively supports the Data Science chapter by building data pipelines / products for specific insights and provides a robust sandbox environment for their R&D and experimentation.
• Cost Management: Ensure solutions are cost effective and that the future cost of ownership has been considered when building new solutions.
• Data Governance Support: Actively support the Governance & Architecture chapter and Operational Resilience Product Owner by providing robust, secure, and scalable production data analytics solutions or products with good governance, quality checks, master data management, and data lineage.

3. Strategy, Governance & Innovation

• Strategic Influence: Work with senior stakeholders to understand high-value business problems, influencing the overall design and technical direction of RE&ILS's digital transformation in relation to its data assets.
• Data Technology Ownership: Take responsibility for making technology choices, researching, evaluating, and adopting new technologies with a "right tool for the job" mentality. Work with the Architects to ensure proposed new technologies go through the correct EA processes.
• DevOps Maturity, Cost & Monitoring: Ensure solutions can be easily built, deployed, and monitored when they go into production, maintaining a keen eye on infrastructure costs.
• Automation and Self-Serve Tooling Adoption: Lead the implementation of secure, scalable, cost-effective, and automated data pipelines and products and self-service data analytics and business intelligence solutions for the business analysts (using DataIku, Snowflake and Power BI). Help support the role out of these tools and coaching of less technical business colleagues – to aid with adoption.

Required Experience and Structure

• Reporting: Reports into the RE&ILS Head of Data
• Direct Reports: Direct line management for some FTE Data Engineers within the RE&ILS Data Engineering Chapter (based in London or Lisbon) including a few Partner resources too.
• Key Partners: RE&ILS CTO, RE&ILS Head of Data, RE&ILS Lead Data Scientist, Product Managers, Product Owners, and strategic partners (e.g. Google Cloud, Snowflake, DataIku, Prefect, Microsoft).

Candidate Profile

The successful candidate will be a strong, dynamic, energetic and senior data engineer who wants to move into their first people management role. You will have with immense curiosity and a passion for data. You must possess the technical acumen to drive the architecture of a modern cloud-based data ecosystem, coupled with the people skills to mentor and build a high-performing engineering team. This role is ideally suited to someone interested in working with the latest cloud technologies in a dynamic environment, facing complex data wrangling and high-variety data asset and product challenges and wanting to step into people management (in terms of their career progression).

Main experience required is:

• Deep Interest in Leadership: As an experienced data engineer - has previously demonstrated excellent traits in mentoring and coaching more junior engineers and has been happy to invest in them - clearly demonstrating they care about other peoples’ career progression
• Technical Depth: At least 5 years' experience in Data Engineering or similar engineering roles. Must be a strong hands-on technologist with expertise in cloud platforms (Azure and GCP preferred), Snowflake, Python, SQL, Prefect, Dbt, DataIku, Power BI, and infrastructure technologies (Terraform/Docker)
• Data Expertise: Strong understanding of database design patterns (OLTP, OLAP, EAV), various database types (SQL, Graph, NoSQL, Time Series), and data orchestration tools (Prefect, Airflow, ADF or Apache NiFi)
• Value Delivery Focus: Proven ability to deliver value incrementally, operating with a practical mindset, and a strong understanding of how to deploy fast R&D solutions versus robust operational systems
• Data Governance: Solid understanding of how to incorporate data privacy, data lineage, discovery, master data management, and governance within production data pipelines and data products
• Educator: shown the ability to train and coach more junior and mid-level engineers – ensuring they have excellent career progression and become high performers.
• Commercial Savvy: Commercial awareness necessary to ensure work is prioritized, targeted appropriately, and technical choices are cost-effective
• Legacy: Good practical experience with our legacy database technologies including SQL Server, SSIS, SSRS, SSAS, and Tableau

If you are a visionary senior data engineer ready to start leading our acceleration in value delivery and champion all things Data, we invite you to apply for the position of Lead Data Engineer at Hiscox Re & ILS. Join our team and be a catalyst for Cloud Data adoption in a dynamic, forward-thinking organization.

Work with amazing people and be part of a unique culture