We're the team behind the AI-powered customer engagement platform that's transforming how businesses connect with their customers - turning every conversation into a revenue-driving moment.
Our platform helps contact centre teams achieve their goals through intelligent automation, predictive insights, and seamless customer experiences. We build technology that empowers people, not replaces them.
We are proud of our reputation for combining cutting-edge tech with down-to-earth people, we have big ambitions and a clear sense of who we are. Our culture is driven by our values: we take ownership, move fast, challenge the status quo, and learn constantly. Working at MaxContact means being stretched, you’ll be trusted with responsibility early, expected to think commercially, and encouraged to act decisively. We don’t stand still, and neither will you.
At the same time, we believe high performance only works in a safe, supportive environment. You’ll be surrounded by smart, driven people who want to see you succeed, who value openness and honesty, and who see mistakes as part of learning quickly and getting better.
We're builders, problem-solvers, and customer champions who believe in innovation with purpose, human-first technology, and delivering results that matter. You'll work alongside passionate colleagues building technology that directly impacts how thousands of businesses connect with millions of customers every day.If you’re ambitious, curious, and excited by the idea of building something meaningful in a fast-moving tech business.
We are looking for an ambitious and technically excellent Senior Data Lead
The Senior Data Engineer is a technical leader within the data engineering team, responsible for delivering complex, high-impact data pipelines, models, and infrastructure within the technical vision set by the Head of Platform. You will own the design and implementation of reliable and scalable data systems, mentor other engineers, and provide expert input on challenging technical problems.
This role is hands-on while also requiring you to coordinate work across multiple engineers, establish standards, and lead data initiatives. You will work closely with analytics, product, and platform teams to ensure that data solutions are trustworthy, performant, and aligned to business needs, enabling rapid, safe, and informed decision-making across the organisation.
Responsabilities
Data Modelling & Warehousing
- Design and maintain dimensional models, semantic layers, and dbt projects for key business domain
- Ensure models are scalable, versioned, and maintain backward compatibility for consumers
- Define and maintain metric definitions in the semantic layer to prevent metric drift
Pipelines & Orchestration
- Build and operate reliable batch and streaming pipelines using tools such as Airflow, dbt, Kafka/Kinesis, or equivalent
- Implement idempotent, replayable ELT/ETL workflows with clear SLAs
- Lead design of complex DAGs including dependencies, backfills, late-arriving data handling, and data quality checks
Data Quality & Reliability
- Implement and enforce comprehensive testing frameworks (dbt tests, custom validations, freshness checks)
- Define and manage data contracts between producers and consumers
- Set and monitor SLAs for data freshness and completeness; lead root cause analysis for reliability incidents
Infrastructure & Platforms
- Work with cloud warehouses/lakehouses (Data Lake, Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or similar)
- Manage and maintain PostgreSQL clusters used for both operational and analytical workloads, ensuring reliability, backups, replication, scaling, and cost optimisation
- Optimise storage formats (Parquet/Delta/Iceberg) for performance and cost efficiency
- Partner with platform engineers on orchestration, data service provisioning, and IAM
Performance & Cost
- Optimise queries, models, and pipelines for performance, scalability, and cost
- Introduce caching, partitioning, clustering, and materialisation strategies
- Monitor and tune PostgreSQL query performance and indexing strategies
- Collaborate with FinOps and platform to implement cost guardrails and monitoring
Security & Governance
- Implement RBAC and least-privilege access controls for datasets and PostgreSQL instances
- Design privacy-by-default solutions (masking, tokenisation, row-level security)
- Contribute to metadata, lineage, and catalogue systems to ensure discoverability and compliance
Leadership & Mentoring
- Mentor associate and mid-level data engineers through code reviews, pairing, and structured feedback
- Lead knowledge-sharing sessions and contribute to internal documentation and training
- Run delivery of multi-pipeline projects, breaking down epics into slices, sequencing risk and value, and coordinating dependencies
Success Measure
- Pipeline SLAs met consistently; incidents resolved with systemic fixes, not patches
- Comprehensive data quality test coverage across key domains; no recurring issues without RCA and fix
- Measurable improvement in junior engineer capability through active mentoring and code review
- Complex data initiatives delivered on time and to agreed scope
- Positive stakeholder trust scores from analytics, product, and platform teams
- Pipeline and warehouse costs tracked, optimised, and within agreed targets
Values and Behaviours
- Customer value first: Outcomes over features
- Ownership mindset and accountability
- Curiosity and willingness to learn, particularly around AI and emerging technology
- Collaboration over silos
- Adaptable and comfortable in a fast-moving, scaling business
- Resilience under pressure: calm leadership during incidents and data quality failures, with a focus on systemic improvement
Training and Enablement
- Structured onboarding covering our products, customers, systems, and data landscape
- Full systems and tooling training from day one
- Access to learning resources, conferences, and a professional development budget
- Regular 1:1s with a clear career development conversation about progression into Principal Engineer (IC track) or Engineering Manager (people leadership track)
Skills and Experience
- Strong hands-on experience delivering complex data engineering projects in cloud-native environments
- Expert SQL skills and deep knowledge of data modelling (dimensional/star schemas and semantic layers)
- Strong experience with dbt for transformation, testing, and metric definitions
- Proven ability to build and maintain ELT/ETL pipelines (Azure Data Factory, Airflow, Dagster, Prefect, or similar)
- Experience with at least one cloud data warehouse or lakehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift, or similar)
- Strong PostgreSQL skills including management, tuning, indexing, replication, and performance optimisation
- Solid Python or Scala skills for pipeline development
- Strong knowledge of data testing frameworks, data contracts, and SLAs/SLOs
- Familiarity with streaming data technologies (Kafka, Kinesis, or Pub/Sub)
- Good understanding of storage formats (Parquet, Delta, Iceberg)
- Knowledge of privacy, security, and compliance principles (GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC 2)
Desirable
- Experience acting as a senior or lead engineer on multi-person data projects
- Implementing observability and reliability improvements for data systems at scale
- Familiarity with data science workflows and ML feature pipelines
- Experience with FinOps or cost optimisation practices for data infrastructure
- Exposure to data cataloguing, metadata management, or lineage tooling
Benefits and Perks
- 25 days annual leave plus your birthday off - So you can genuinely switch off, recharge, and bring your best self to work.
- Increased holiday entitlement with length of service - We recognise commitment and loyalty. As you grow with MaxContact, we give more back because owning it over time should be rewarded.
- Enhanced maternity and paternity packages -We support our people at every stage of life. By enabling families to take meaningful time when it matters most.
- Life insurance - Providing peace of mind for you and your loved ones reflects our commitment to doing the right thing and owning our responsibility to support our people beyond the workplace.
- Enhanced pension options- We help you invest in your future, not just your role today enabling you to make it count over the long term.
- Company-paid sick leave- We trust our people to take the time they need to recover and return well.
- Personal training allowance - We invest in your growth and encourage continuous learning. You’re empowered to develop your skills, challenge yourself, and challenge the status quo for your career and for our customers.
- Buy and sell holiday options- Flexibility matters. This option allows you to shape your working life around what’s important to you.
- Social, charity and culture committee events- We believe strong connections build great teams. These activities bring people together, support our communities, and reinforce our one team mindset.
- Hybrid working (minimum two days in the office)- We balance flexibility with collaboration.
- Onsite gym facilities
- Employee assistant programme - we care about your wellbeing
AI in Our Hiring Process
AI in Our Hiring Process: At MaxContact, we expect engineers to work effectively with AI tools every day. We welcome candidates who use AI to prepare their applications and encourage you to demonstrate your ability to collaborate with AI during any take-home assessments. During live interviews, we will assess your ability to think through problems and make engineering decisions — both with and without AI assistance.
We are an equal opportunity employer, if you require any adjustments during the hiring process please contact hannah.holmes@maxcontact.com