Lead Data Engineer (Databricks)

Lead Data Engineer (Databricks)

River Water Quality ProgrammeWarrington (Hybrid - 3 days onsite per week)

At United Utilities, we're committed to protecting the environment that millions of people depend on every day. As part of our Digital Services team, you'll play a pivotal role in one of our most important and high-impact initiatives: near real time monitoring of river water quality.

We're looking for a Lead Data Engineer to take technical ownership of modern, scalable data platforms that turn complex environmental and telemetry data into trusted insights for regulators, scientists, and operational teams.

As the Lead Data Engineer on our River Water Quality Programme, you'll design, build, and optimise Databricks-based data pipelines that enable timely, reliable and well-governed data across the organisation.

You'll:

• Design and develop scalable batch and streaming data pipelines using Databricks, Spark and Delta Lake
• Implement medallion architecture (bronze/silver/gold) to ensure data quality, lineage and efficient consumption
• Optimise Spark jobs and workflows to meet near real-time monitoring SLAs
• Build and maintain streaming pipelines using Structured Streaming and Delta Live Tables
• Ensure strong data governance, including schema enforcement, validation rules and ACID compliance
• Orchestrate and automate pipelines using Databricks Jobs, APIs or cloud-native schedulers
• Collaborate with data scientists, analysts and environmental specialists to deliver high-quality, well-documented datasets
• Monitor, troubleshoot and continuously improve production pipelines for reliability, performance and cost efficiency
• Champion best practices across CI/CD, testing, version control and documentation

Act as a technical leader and mentor, raising standards across the data engineering community

Essential

• Deep expertise in Databricks (Spark / PySpark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Workflows)
• Strong experience building ETL/ELT pipelines, both batch and streaming
• Advanced Python and SQL skills
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS or GCP)
• Solid understanding of data modelling and modern architectures
• Strong knowledge of data governance, security and compliance

Desirable

• Experience with orchestration tools such as Airflow
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, Git workflows and automated testing
• Exposure to real-time, IoT or environmental telemetry data

Experience & Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering or a related discipline
• 5+ years' experience in data engineering roles, including 3+ years with Databricks

Proven ability to lead technically and mentor engineers

We believe in rewarding our people properly:

• Up to 10.5% annual bonus
• Outstanding pension - up to 21% combined contribution
• Private healthcare
• Share buy scheme
• Wellbeing benefits and support programmes

Why United Utilities?

You'll be working on data that truly matters - protecting rivers, supporting environmental compliance, and helping shape the future of sustainable water management across the North West.

If you're passionate about modern data engineering, enjoy technical leadership, and want your work to have real-world environmental impact, we'd love to hear from you.