Lead GCP Data Engineer - Near Real-Time Data

Job Title:Lead Data Engineer - Near Real-Time Ingestion(GCP)
Location: Birmingham x2 days per week
Salary/Rate: £500 per day
Start Date: February
Job Type: 6 month contract - Inside IR35

Company Introduction
We have an exciting opportunity now available with one of our sector-leading consultancy clients! They are currently looking for a Lead Data Engineer to join their team for a six-month contract.

Job Responsibilities/Objectives
You will be responsible for owning and driving the design, development, and operational excellence of our (NRT) data ingestion platforms on Google Cloud. In this role, you will architect and deliver low-latency ingestion pipelines, enabling mission-critical, high-throughput data flows from diverse source systems into BigQuery and Cloud SQL using cutting-edge CDC and streaming technologies.

? Design and build near real-time ingestion frameworks using Pub/Sub, Kafka, Dataflow (Beam), GCS, BigQuery, and Cloud SQL.

• Develop and optimize streaming pipelines leveraging Apache Beam in Java or Python, deployed on Dataflow.
• Implement CDC ingestion patterns using Datastream, ensuring resilience against schema drift and low-latency updates.
• Utilize advanced BigQuery optimization techniques, including Storage Write API, partitioning, clustering, and materialized views.

? Tune streaming workloads for latency, throughput, back pressure management, windowing, and watermarks.

• Set up robust dead-letter queues, replay strategies, retries, and error-handling frameworks.
• Establish enterprise-grade observability with Cloud Monitoring, Logging, and Trace.

? Implement strong security controls across IAM, KMS, VPC Service Controls, Secret Manager, and DLP.

? Lead the NRT ingestion roadmap and partner closely with architecture, platform, and analytics teams.

• Mentor data engineers and promote engineering excellence, reusable patterns, and automation.

Required Skills/Experience
The ideal candidate will have the following:

? Deep hands-on expertise with Google Cloud Platform services including:

o Pub/Sub

• • Dataflow
  • BigQuery
  • GCS
  • Cloud Composer
• Strong experience with CDC technologies, especially Datastream.
• Proficiency in Apache Beam (Java or Python)and SQL.
• Solid knowledge of Terraform, CI/CD/GitOps, and container orchestration (e.g., GKE).
• Proven experience leading teams, driving technical strategy, and delivering complex ingestion systems at scale.

Disclaimer
Notwithstanding any guidelines given to level of experience sought, we will consider candidates from outside this range if they can demonstrate the necessary competencies.

Square One is acting as both an employment agency and an employment business, and is an equal opportunities recruitment business. Square One embraces diversity and will treat everyone equally. Please see our website for our full diversity statement.