Senior GCP Data Engineer

About the company

Homeprotect was created to serve homeowners who are often overlooked by the insurance market. Since 2002, the business has blended intelligent technology with practical human expertise to cover hundreds of thousands of distinctive homes across the UK.

The team is looking for someone who enjoys tackling challenging problems, taking ownership, and working in a high-standards environment where people share ideas openly and support one another. This is a role with real scope to make an impact, develop your career, and help protect customers’ homes and belongings.

Working environment

Homeprotect describes itself as a compact team made up of insurance experts, technologists, data scientists, and customer-focused professionals. The company values pace, autonomy, and collaboration across functions, with flexible working that helps people balance work and life while still delivering strong outcomes. It has also been recognised as a Great Place to Work UK for seven years in a row, most recently ranked 29th nationally after moving up 71 places in one year.

Role purpose

This position offers the chance to help shape a brand-new GCP Data Analytics Platform from the very beginning. The successful candidate will play a senior hands-on engineering role, helping design and deliver a robust, production-ready platform with strong emphasis on Google Cloud Platform engineering, dbt, and dimensional data modelling.

You will report to the Head of Data Engineering and collaborate with data engineering and platform colleagues to create dependable ingestion patterns, maintainable dbt transformations, and analytics-ready dimensional marts that support business decision-making.

Key responsibilities

• Deliver complete data products on GCP, covering everything from source onboarding through to curated datasets, marts, and outputs used by the business.
• Create and run ingestion pipelines using the right approach for the source, including CDC, APIs, SFTP, and streaming, while keeping them reliable, scalable, and operationally straightforward.
• Develop and refine warehouse transformation workflows in dbt, with attention to accuracy, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Build dimensional data models for analytics at scale, including clearly defined grain, fact and dimension tables, and star schema design.
• Convert business needs into clear dimensional designs and dbt implementations, working with stakeholders to validate outputs and iterate quickly.
• Contribute to Agile delivery by supporting planning, estimation, sprint cadence, and ongoing process improvements.
• Focus on work that creates visible business value and speeds up insight generation for stakeholders.
• Design pipelines and scheduled jobs to be production-ready, with idempotency, observability, fault tolerance, and easy supportability.
• Promote automated testing and deployment practices so changes can move safely across environments with minimal manual intervention.
• Help improve operational tooling such as logging, alerting, runbooks, and dashboards so problems can be identified and resolved quickly.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of experience in data engineering, including building and running production-grade data pipelines and data products.
• At least 3 years of production experience on Google Cloud Platform.
• Advanced practical dbt experience in production, including layered project design, strong testing and documentation habits, incremental modelling, safe schema evolution, late-arriving data handling, and backfills that do not disrupt downstream marts.
• Deep dimensional modelling knowledge, including grain definition, conformed dimensions, fact and dimension tables, slowly changing dimensions Type 1 and Type 2, late-arriving facts, and consistent business definitions across marts.
• Strong capability in designing reliable data pipelines and making sound engineering trade-offs.
• Hands-on experience with BigQuery, Cloud Storage (GCS), Cloud Run/Functions, and Cloud Composer (Airflow) or similar orchestration tools.
• Experience with multiple ingestion styles, including CDC, API-based feeds, SFTP, and streaming.
• Solid understanding of medallion architecture and how to apply it in a modern analytics platform.
• Experience working in Agile/Scrum environments and contributing positively to team ceremonies and delivery rhythm.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain technical choices to both technical and non-technical audiences and document appropriately.
• Preferred but not essential: GCP certification such as Professional Data Engineer.
• Preferred but not essential: practical experience with Terraform, Kafka, Dataflow, and Pub/Sub.
• Preferred but not essential: experience working in regulated sectors such as insurance or financial services.

Benefits

• Support for learning and career growth through structured learning, mentoring, buddy support, on-the-job experience, and cross-functional projects.
• Backed funding for relevant professional qualifications where they will add the most value.
• Lunch and Learn sessions to stay connected with wider business activity.
• Private healthcare through BUPA.
• Employee Assistance Programme with legal, financial, and counselling support.
• Wellbeing Centre with digital tools and resources.
• Regular wellbeing seminars and workshops.
• Annual flu jab and annual eye care voucher.
• Annual discretionary bonus of up to 30% of base pay.
• Life insurance worth four times salary.
• Pension scheme with Aegon.
• Substantial discount on Homeprotect home insurance, plus a friends-and-family discount.
• Staff referral bonus when a recommended candidate joins.
• 25 days of annual leave plus public holidays, with the option to buy or sell up to five extra days each year.
• Flexible working, with at least one office day per week and a homeworking starter kit from day one.
• Contribution toward additional home office equipment within the first six months.
• Charity partnership with Refuge, along with regular social, wellbeing, and charitable events.

Additional information

Homeprotect is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applicants from all backgrounds. The company values difference and encourages candidates who may need extra support during the application process to share their requirements at any stage.

Visa sponsorship may be considered on a case-by-case basis for the right candidate.

Your personal data will be handled in line with the company’s recruitment data privacy policy.

Regulatory responsibilities

As an FCA-regulated insurer, the role carries important conduct and compliance expectations. Colleagues are expected to follow the FCA Individual Conduct Rules 1–6, act with integrity, exercise proper skill and care, remain open with regulators, and focus on good customer outcomes.

You will be expected to work within approved processes and authority limits, keep accurate and auditable records, protect data under UK GDPR and internal information security policies, escalate risks and exceptions quickly, report incidents, breaches, and any financial crime or sanctions concerns, use whistleblowing routes where needed, support vulnerable customers with reasonable adjustments, and complete all required training to maintain competence.

If the position falls under SM&CR, a separate document detailing the relevant regulatory responsibilities will be issued.