Senior Data Practice Lead

About the role

YLD is establishing data as a core practice and requires a London-based technical leader to drive this initiative. You will serve as the primary technical authority for clients, balancing hands-on engineering with commercial strategy and practice development. This role reports to the Head of Engineering and involves shaping new business, guiding delivery teams, and building the company's external reputation in the data space.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Execute hands-on data engineering, including pipeline development, transformation layers, and infrastructure.
• Represent YLD in client meetings to translate complex problems into actionable data strategies and project scopes.
• Define internal standards for documentation, testing, and code reviews while mentoring engineering staff.
• Act as a technical escalation point for active client engagements.
• Build the data practice by contributing to hiring, sales support, and community engagement through events and writing.
• Travel to client sites for workshops, discovery sessions, and relationship management.

Requirements

• Proven track record in technical leadership, including managing teams or functions.
• Ability to communicate engineering constraints to non-technical stakeholders and negotiate project commitments.
• Deep expertise in SQL, including performance tuning and query planning.
• Experience building production-grade data systems using typed, testable Python.
• Strong understanding of data modelling trade-offs, including dimensional, Data Vault, and normalised designs.
• Proficiency in transformation architecture, pipeline design, and data observability.
• Experience with CI/CD for data, data governance, and cost-optimisation strategies.
• Knowledge of AI engineering constructs such as RAG, semantic search, and agentic workflows.
• Ability to work across various platforms, including orchestration tools like Airflow or Dagster, warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks, and transformation tools like dbt or Spark.

Nice to have

• Prior experience in a consultancy or agency environment.
• An existing public profile in the data community, or a clear appetite to build one.

Skills & tools

• Orchestration: Airflow, Dagster
• Warehousing: Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks
• Ingestion: Fivetran, Airbyte
• Transformation: dbt, Spark
• Languages: SQL, Python
• AI/ML: RAG, semantic search, evals, guardrails

Practical notes

• Benefits include private health care via Vitality, enhanced paid parental leave up to 6 months, a pension scheme, 25 days of annual leave plus public holidays, a 2000 GBP annual training budget, and a 300 GBP annual hardware allowance.
• The recruitment process consists of a 45-60 minute screening call, a 60-minute technical interview with the Head of Engineering, and a 60-90 minute scenario exercise with leadership.
• YLD operates with a remote-first culture and prioritizes flexible working arrangements.