Lead Data Engineer

About NextWave

NextWave is an award-winning Digital Acceleration Consultancy for Financial Services with a particular focus on rapidly driving business outcomes and modernizing Financial Institutions through technology. Clients come to NextWave because they have key integration, business growth, efficiency and control objectives and seek a more future-focused alternative to the big-name consultancies. Strategy, Innovation, Complex Transformation, FinTech Solutioning and Social Enterprise are at the heart of what we do.

By combining deep industry expertise with the innovative deployment of business solutions built on market-leading technology, we enable clients to realize business outcomes better, faster and safer. We help our clients to define their strategies and partner with them to execute, often deploying fintech and low-code solutions which can typically be delivered 5x faster than traditional approaches, resulting in processes automated from weeks to minutes and data decision accuracy improvements of up to 90%.

The NextWave team comprises high-caliber Financial Services industry change leaders, including ex-MDs from top-tier firms and new talent. We are the consulting partner of choice for leading FinTechs, Banking, Asset & Wealth Management, Insurance, and Market Infrastructure clients.

Role Outline

As a Lead Data Engineer, you’ll lead and mentor a team of data engineers to build scalable, production-grade data solutions within an agile environment. You’ll play a key role in deploying Quantexa solutions using technologies such as Spark, Hadoop, Scala, and Elasticsearch, across cloud environments including GCP, Azure, and AWS. You’ll collaborate with solution architects and engineers to deliver high-quality, fault-tolerant systems for complex data challenges. You’ll also act as a technical advisor to clients, simplifying complex concepts to support informed decision-making.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and support a team of data engineers within an agile delivery framework.
• Design and write robust, fault tolerant code, efficient code for production level data processing systems.
• Configure and deploy the Quantexa software using modern big data tools and cloud platforms, such as Spark, Hadoop, Scala, Elasticsearch; and hosting on both private and public virtual clouds, using tools such as Google cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon.
• Collaborate with solution architects, product owners and technical analysts to establish design and build requirements and be able to translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and clients.
• Promote best practices, collaboration, and knowledge sharing across engineering teams.

Requirements

• Hands on data engineering or a similar technical development, with 5+ years of experience of industry and at least 2 years in a leadership position.
• Proficient in Scala (preferred), Java, Python, or equivalent, and a strong adherence to engineering principles
• Experience building and deploying production-level batch data processing systems.
• Strong understanding of software development best practices and release processes.
• Hands-on experience with tools like Git, Gradle, Jenkins, Docker, and Nexus, and technologies supporting automation and DevOps (e.g. Jenkins, Docker and a little bit of good old Bash scripting). You’ll be familiar with developing within a version-controlled process that regularly makes use of these tools and technologies
• Skilled communicator, comfortable working with clients and cross-functional teams in rapidly changing client environments.
• Familiarity with testing libraries (e.g., ScalaTest) and different testing approaches (unit, integration) and can give examples of self-written tests
• Hold Quantexa certification(s).
• Experience mentoring or managing engineering teams.
• A passion for innovation and driving business growth.
• Strong technical, analytical, and communication skills across all organisational levels, both written and verbal
• Proven stakeholder management and engagement expertise
• Excellent problem-solving with a logical, structured approach
• Highly organized with a track record of delivering complex outcomes

Benefits

• Competitive salary
• Agile/ Flexible working
• Professional training and accreditation
• Central London location

All our opportunities require that applicants are eligible to work in the specified country/location, unless otherwise stated in the job description.

Our commitment to you:

We will provide mentoring, training and guidance (technical skills, soft skills and Finance business skills) from our leadership team who have many years of practical experience delivering business outcomes in the Finance arena.

Work pattern:

This is a permanent role with a potential for flexibility for agile ways of working, both formal and informal, that allow for the best outcomes for our people and our clients.

What we do:

We provide Consulting expertise and delivery services with a focus on a select group of progressive technology platforms which are helping to change the FS Industry.

The evolution of today’s digital business landscape requires firms to reinvent to stay relevant and succeed in the new market, at a pace not seen before. Opportunities and threats are emerging from traditional and non-traditional sectors, driving new strategies across the dimensions of clients, competition, data, innovation and value. A new stack of FinTech platform technologies is enabling firms to reinvent their value proposition to collaborate and compete on customer experience, data insights, operational resilience and time to market.

Location:

You will be based in the NextWave USA office, however, travel may be required for client-based projects and some projects will be located fully at client office locations.