About the Position
This is a unique opportunity to join a fast-growing financial service’s tech and innovation hub scale up, here in Dublin city centre.
Brightwater Executive is delighted to be retained exclusively for this key hire.
This is a hands-on leadership role suited to someone who can operate at both strategic and execution levels, with company-wide technical ownership of for the firm’s data engineering strategy with responsibility for translating that strategy into production-grade platform delivery.
As Head of Data Engineering, you will be accountable for how the company engineers its long-term data asset platform which is being built in AWS using modern data engineering practices and cloud-native infrastructure
This will suit someone who can think creatively and develop innovative, technology and data-driven solutions that create differentiation in the insurance market. They will be supported by a culture of ambition, innovation and drive.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Data Engineering Strategy
- Define the technical data engineering strategy across ingestion, transformation, modelling, quality, lineage, metadata and consumption
- Establish reusable engineering patterns for third-party platform extracts, vendor data, APIs, bordereaux, underwriting data, exposure data, claims data and internal analytical outputs
- Define the technical roadmap for the data platform and sequence engineering investment
- Set architectural principles and standards for how the data asset is engineered, maintained, controlled and consumed
Data Engineering & Delivery
- Translate platform architecture and requirements into robust, scalable implementations
- Design and implement data ingestion and transformation pipelines combining fragmented datasets including exposure data, modelling outputs, internal analytics and unstructured information
- Build shared libraries to ensure consistent data access across applications
- Build datasets and platform capabilities supporting AI and modelling workflows across the business
- Define schemas and storage structures across different layers of the platform
Data Quality & Technical Governance
- Define and implement technical standards for data quality, validation, testing, monitoring, lineage and observability
- Design and implement catalogue, metadata and lineage capabilities that make core datasets discoverable, auditable and reusable
- Partner with data governance stakeholders to translate agreed business definitions and calculation logic into version-controlled data models and transformations
- Ensure pipelines meet requirements around auditability, consistency and reproducibility
Cross-Functional Technical Leadership
- Collaborate with Capital & Risk, Underwriting, Finance & Operations, Platform Engineering and future data governance functions
- Act as the senior technical authority for data engineering decisions across the platform and data asset
- Provide technical guidance and mentorship to engineers and analysts working with data
- Help shape the future data engineering capability, including engineering standards, delivery patterns, hiring priorities and team design
The Ideal Candidate and Attributes
- Proven experience in a senior engineering, or technology leadership role with strong experience defining and leading data engineering strategy in a cloud-first environment.
- Experience working across ingestion, transformation, storage and consumption layers, with a track record leading / building production ETL/ELT pipelines in AWS
- Experience designing data platform architecture, technical standards and reusable engineering patterns
- Strong technical judgement, with the ability to influence architecture and engineering direction
- BSc/MSc in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience
Technical Skills
- Programming: Python; SQL
- AWS Data Platform - S3; Glue; Lambda; ECS; DynamoDB
- Redshift or similar analytical databases
- Data Engineering - ETL / ELT pipeline design; Data modelling and schema design
- Working with APIs and external data providers
- Data validation and monitoring
- Software Engineering - Git / GitHub; CI/CD pipelines; Infrastructure-as-code
- Strong understanding of modern software engineering and cloud infrastructure concepts
- Experience with open table formats (Iceberg, Delta Lake or similar) would be advantageous.
Desirable
- Experience in a greenfield environment.
- Experience in financial services, insurance, or another regulated industry.
- Exposure to data, AI, or GenAI-enabled platforms.
- Familiarity with modern enterprise integration across application, data, and cloud domains.
Remuneration Package
Highly Competitive + Benefits.
Contact
Brightwater Executive has been exclusively retained to lead this search. For a confidential discussion regarding this Head of Data Engineering position, please apply in confidence and contact Estelle Davis at e.davis@brightwaterexecutive.com | DDI: + 353 1 592 7844.
