Data Engineer

Sparta Global are hiring a Senior Data Engineer - this is a role that combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership, including mentoring junior engineers and driving best practice across an organisation's data engineering function. This is a 12-Month Fixed Term Contract, requiring 3 days per week on-site in Blackpool. Role Summary: Designing, building, and optimising scalable data pipelines that support analytics, reporting, and operational use cases. You will play a key role in shaping the organisation’s data architecture, ensuring data is reliable, accessible, and performant across multiple systems, while helping to manage a team of junior data engineers. Key Responsibilities: • Mentor junior data engineers and support their technical development, while promoting best practices in their coding, testing, and deployment. • Design and implement robust, scalable data pipelines (batch and real-time) to ingest, transform, and load data from multiple sources • Build and maintain ETL/ELT processes to support analytics and BI platforms • Identify and reuse existing data flows where appropriate to improve efficiency and reduce duplication • Ensure data pipelines are fault-tolerant, observable, and maintainable • Lead the development of streaming data solutions for real-time data processing • Design and implement data models optimised for analytics workloads (e.g. star/snowflake schemas) • Work with modern data warehouse platforms (e.g. Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift or similar) • Identify bottlenecks and implement improvements across storage, compute, and transformation layers • Ensure efficient handling of large-scale datasets • Lead work on database design, optimisation, and maintenance • Ensure data integrity, security, and governance standards are met Key Skills & Experience: • Previous experience mentoring junior engineers is a must-have • Strong experience with Python or Scala for data processing • Advanced SQL skills with experience handling large datasets • Experience building and maintaining ETL/ELT pipelines in production environments • Hands-on experience with workflow orchestration tools (e.g. Airflow)