Principal Tech Lead - Data

Company:Marsh

Description:

This is a hands-on, leader-of-leaders role. You lead data engineering through Tech Leads while personally owning delivery of a significant project. You can resolve an architecture trade-off with a technology peer, coach a Tech Lead through a difficult decision, and explain what will ship and when to a business stakeholder. You drive the work forward; you don’t just coordinate.

You sit within Marsh’s Innovation & Data Office (IDO), delivering priority data initiatives across Marsh’s businesses. Assignments evolve with business needs and priorities; the constant is ownership of technical direction, ensuring high-quality delivery across projects, and that your teams are building reliable, governed data solutions.

On each priority initiative, you work with business stakeholders, product and delivery teams to turn objectives into an engineering roadmap. You make architectural decisions, direct implementation and take production capabilities through to adoption. You ensure that engineering efforts translate into tangible business outcomes, with success measured by the value delivered.

In parallel, you develop IDO’s wider data engineering capability through Tech Leads. Alongside IDO leadership, you shape engineering standards, culture, hiring and delivery across initiatives. You keep coordination focused and proportionate so that you can remain technically accountable for a substantial project, with the balance dependent on the needs of the portfolio.

This is neither a programme-coordination position nor an architect role detached from implementation. It combines direct technical delivery accountability with genuine influence over engineering standards, the wider organisation and the development of other technical leaders.

You will:

• Lead technical delivery on priority projects. Own the engineering direction and implementation of a significant initiative, from architecture and delivery planning through to production and adoption. Agree what success looks like with business stakeholders, Engagement Leads and product teams. Make scope and sequencing trade-offs explicit, and move to new priorities as the portfolio evolves.
• Own technical decisions and architecture. Work with business technology leaders, IDO leadership and Tech Leads to set a coherent technical direction across initiatives. Make important decisions on data models, ingestion contracts, interfaces and serving patterns, balancing reliability, security, cost and speed of delivery. Foster distributed decision-making across teams, guided by engineering standards agreed collectively with Tech Leads.
• Make governance real. Ensure data governance is built into delivery: access controls, data quality, lineage, metadata, auditability and lifecycle ownership. Work with our Governance team, business data owners, Domain Product Leads and security teams to ensure we build in enforceable controls across countries, regions and products.
• Lead the leaders and ensure delivery. Be accountable for engineering delivery across pods, working through Tech Leads. Align capacity and skills with agreed priorities, resolve dependencies, and make delivery risks and trade-offs visible early. Challenge commitments that the teams cannot credibly meet. Coach leaders to own their decisions and results, and escalate priority conflicts with clear options.
• Stay involved in real engineering. Review designs and code, test difficult assumptions, and work through SQL, Python and Spark problems where your involvement changes the outcome. Step into difficult delivery or production problems when needed, then leave the team better able to handle them. Maintain technical credibility while giving Tech Leads room to lead.
• Build the organisation, not just the project. Shape team composition, workforce planning, hiring standards and onboarding with IDO leadership and Tech Leads. Set clear expectations for technical leadership, coach Tech Leads, and work with the relevant people managers on performance, progression and succession. Build cohesive teams across employees, contractors and regional hubs.
• Raise the engineering bar. Set and embed practical engineering standards with IDO leadership and Tech Leads. Make Git, CI/CD, automated testing, code review and documentation part of everyday delivery. Build a culture where engineers raise risks early, challenge designs constructively, learn from incidents, and plan around failure through measuring the right things and pivoting when assumptions don’t hold. Use evidence from delivery and production to improve how teams work.
• Own the transition into operation. Ensure teams agree service expectations, monitoring, support ownership and handover before release. Balance new delivery with reliability, operating cost and technical debt. Ensure capabilities are supportable in production, with clear operational accountability and an effective handover where ownership transfers.
• Build reusable foundations. The platform is Databricks running on Azure and AWS. Work with Tech Leads to establish reusable ingestion patterns, infrastructure-as-code, governed datasets, documented interfaces and a structured Git-based CI/CD release process using Declarative Automation Bundles. Make reuse practical across teams, and manage technical debt so today’s delivery strengthens future work.
• Work across the business and technology boundary. Build trusted relationships with business stakeholders, product, and engineering teams. Understand the commercial objective, agree priorities and explain what data engineering can credibly deliver. Challenge scope when it adds cost without sufficient value, and use feedback from adoption to shape what happens next.

Marsh (NYSE: MRSH) is a global leader in risk, reinsurance and capital, people and investments, and management consulting, advising clients in 130 countries. With annual revenue of over $27 billion and more than 95,000 colleagues, Marsh helps build the confidence to thrive through the power of perspective. For more information, visit marsh.com, or follow us on LinkedIn and X.

Marsh is committed to embracing a diverse, inclusive and flexible work environment. We aim to attract and retain the best people and embrace diversity of age, background, disability, ethnic origin, family duties, gender orientation or expression, marital status, nationality, parental status, personal or social status, political affiliation, race, religion and beliefs, sex/gender, sexual orientation or expression, skin color, Traveller community, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an equal opportunities employer. We are committed to providing reasonable support to any candidate with a disability/health condition to allow them to fully participate in the recruitment process. We welcome candidates to contact us at [email protected] to discuss any specific needs.

Marsh is committed to hybrid work, which includes the flexibility of working remotely and the collaboration, connections and professional development benefits of working together in the office. All Marsh colleagues are expected to be in their local office or working onsite with clients at least three days per week. Office-based teams will identify at least one “anchor day” per week on which their full team will be together in person.