Data Engineering Manager

Excited to grow your career? Our purpose is to make it easy for people to save and invest for a better future. We are looking for great people to join us, so please come and invest in YOUR future at Hargreaves Lansdown. We know that sometimes people can be put off applying for a job if they don't tick every box. If you're excited about working for us and have most of the skills or experience we're looking for, please go ahead and apply. We’d love to hear from you! About the role The Data Engineering Manager leads the team responsible for building and operating the data pipelines, transformations, and platform components that deliver trusted data products and certified reporting across the organisation. You'll own engineering delivery end-to-end — ensuring data is ingested, transformed, and served reliably, at scale, and to defined standards. You'll set and enforce engineering practices across the team, manage production operations including monitoring and incident response, and actively manage platform cost and performance. This is a hands-on leadership role: you'll line-manage a team of data engineers, set clear expectations for quality and ownership, and build a culture of continuous improvement. You'll work in a regulated financial services environment where auditability, resilience, and governance are non-negotiable — and where the data you deliver powers executive decision-making, regulatory reporting, and client-facing outcome Key Accountabilities Engineering Delivery & Operations Own the end-to-end delivery of data pipelines, transformations, and platform components required to support the data product roadmap Ensure pipelines are: Idempotent, recoverable, and production-grade Tested at unit, integration, and data-quality levels Observable with clear alerting and escalation paths Documented to a standard that supports shared ownership Manage delivery against sprint commitments, providing clear progress updates and early escalation of risks Own production operations, including: Monitoring and alerting Incident triage, resolution, and root-cause analysis Runbooks and operational documentation On-call or support arrangements where required Ensure production issues are resolved with clear ownership, timelines, and learning Platform Performance, Cost & Sustainability Own the cost and performance profile of data engineering infrastructure Actively monitor and optimise: Query and pipeline performance Compute and storage costs Resource utilisation across environments Make design and delivery decisions that balance performance, cost, and maintainability Manage technical debt as a visible backlog item — not an invisible tax on delivery speed Partner with platform and technology teams on infrastructure evolution, capacity planning, and tooling decisions Engineering Standards & Practices Define, maintain, and enforce engineering standards, including: Coding conventions and naming standards Code review and peer review practices Testing strategy (unit, integration, data quality, regression) CI/CD and deployment practices Branching, versioning, and release management Documentation and metadata requirements Ensure standards are practical, adopted, and reviewed — not theoretical documents that sit unused Act as the engineering design authority for implementation decisions, in partnership with the Principal Data Modeller on data model design Ensure consistency across squads where multiple engineers contribute to shared domains People Leadership & Capability Line manage, coach, and develop data engineers Set clear expectations for delivery quality, ownership, and professional standards Build a high-performing team culture focused on: Quality and craftsmanship Ownership and accountability Continuous improvement and learning Collaboration and knowledge sharing Ensure the team has the right skills, capacity, and structure to meet roadmap commitments Own hiring, onboarding, performance management, and career development Identify and address skill gaps through development plans, hiring, or training Ensure knowledge is distributed — actively reduce single points of failure Stakeholder & Cross-Team Partnership Partner closely with: Data Product Managers (priorities, requirements, acceptance criteria, trade-offs) Principal Data Modeller (data model standards, canonical entities, transformation logic) Data Governance (metadata, lineage, quality controls, access policies) Platform & Technology (infrastructure, tooling, security) Provide realistic delivery forecasts and make trade-offs visible and explicit Translate product requirements into engineering delivery plans with clear dependencies and sequencing Escalate risks, blockers, and capacity constraints early and transparently Represent engineering perspective in roadmap planning and prioritisation discussions Governance, Risk & Regulatory Alignment Ensure engineering delivery meets regulatory, security, and governance requirements Ensure data pipelines and platform components are: Auditable — with clear lineage from source to consumption Observable — with monitoring, logging, and alerting Recoverable — with defined RPO/RTO and tested recovery processes Secure — with appropriate access controls and data handling Support audit, regulatory review, and operational risk assessments Ensure data retention, masking, and access control policies are implemented in code Partner with Data Governance to ensure all delivered assets meet cataloguing, metadata, and quality standards Experience & Skills Essential 8+ years' experience in data engineering or software engineering roles, with at least 2–3 years in a people management capacity Proven experience delivering and operating production data platforms and pipelines at scale Experience working in a regulated environment (e.g. financial services, insurance, banking) Experience operating within a data product or platform operating model — not solely project-based delivery Strong understanding of data engineering principles and best practices Hands-on experience with modern cloud data platforms (e.g. Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or equivalent) Experience with orchestration tools (e.g. Airflow, Dagster, or equivalent) Experience with CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and automated deployment practices Experience defining and enforcing engineering standards across a team Strong operational mindset: reliability, monitoring, incident response, cost management Confident influencing stakeholders and making delivery trade-offs with transparency Clear communicator with both technical and non-technical audiences Comfortable delegating — accountable for outcomes, not personal code output Demonstrated ability to build, grow, and retain high-performing engineering teams Desirable Experience with transformation frameworks (e.g. dbt or equivalent) Experience with streaming or event-driven architectures Exposure to semantic layers, metrics layers, or feature engineering patterns Experience managing platform costs and optimising spend at scale Familiarity with data governance tooling (catalogues, lineage tools, quality frameworks) Experience supporting AI/ML feature pipelines or model serving infrastructure Why us? Here at HL, we’re the UK’s number 1 investment platform for private investors, based in Bristol. For more than 40 years we’ve helped investors save time, tax and money on their investments. To achieve our mission, we believe we have a workplace like no other, with constant learning, dynamic teams, and a great ethos. We're steered by core values that promote service, quality, innovation, and opportunity in everything we do. What's on offer? Discretionary annual bonus* and annual pay review 25 days* holiday plus bank holidays and 1-day additional Christmas closure Option to purchase an additional 5 days holiday** Flexible working options available, including hybrid working Enhanced parental leave Pension scheme up to 11% employer contribution Income Protection and Life insurance (4 x salary core level of cover) Private medical insurance* Health care cash plans - including optical, dental, and outpatient care Health screening programme Help@hand - confidential support including mental health counselling and remote GP Wellhub - unlimited access to fitness providers and wellness coach sessions Variety of travel to work schemes with bike storage and shower facilities Inhouse barista and deli serving subsidised coffee and sandwiches Two paid volunteering days per year * dependant on role level ** only available to select during our annual benefits window, in November each year Hargreaves Lansdown is an inclusive employer that values diversity in its workforce. We encourage applications from all individuals without regard to race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, disability or age. This role may also be available on a flexible working or part time basis – please ask the Recruitment & Onboarding team for more information. Please note, we are unable to provide employment sponsorship to candidates. Hargreaves Lansdown is the UK's number one platform for private investors. Our purpose is to empower people to save and invest with confidence, and today, we are trusted with more than £120 billion by over 1.7 million clients. We are based in the heart of Bristol now with over 2,000 colleagues. We believe we have a workplace like no other, with constant learning, dynamic teams and a great ethos. We're steered by our core values that promote service, quality, innovation, and opportunity in everything we do. For more information about careers at HL and to see all our vacancies, please visit our careers website.