Data Engineering Lead

About the Opportunity

Korn Ferry is supporting our end client investing in a new Cyber Insurance Data & Analytics capability in Dublin and is seeking an experienced Data Engineering Tech Lead to help establish and lead the technical direction of a new cyber data engineering squad. This is a 6 month initial contract with high potential to extend/transition to permanent employment. Please note this is a hybrid/Dublin city centre position.

This is a high-impact leadership role where you'll work at the intersection of data engineering, analytics, and cyber risk modelling. You'll collaborate closely with Product Owners, architects, and business stakeholders to build scalable data solutions that support cyber risk assessment and insurance placement.

This is more than a traditional data engineering role. You'll be responsible for ensuring that data products, analytics models, and technical solutions are designed with downstream business applications and users in mind.

The successful candidate will play a key role in shaping the initial team, influencing technical standards, and helping build a long-term data engineering capability in Dublin.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the technical design and delivery of the Cyber Data Engineering workstream.
• Design, build and implement scalable data engineering solutions and analytics models used to evaluate cyber risk.
• Develop data pipelines, data models and analytics outputs using modern cloud technologies.
• Ensure data products are optimised for consumption by applications, business workflows and analytics users.
• Partner closely with the Product Owner to translate business requirements into technical solutions.
• Help define use cases, acceptance criteria and delivery milestones.
• Provide technical leadership, mentoring and guidance to engineers within the squad.
• Establish engineering standards and promote best practices across the team.
• Support recruitment, onboarding and technical assessment of additional squad members.
• Deliver against fast-paced 2-3 week sprint cycles while maintaining high quality standards.
• Drive clarity around requirements, data quality and technical delivery.

Required Technical Skills & Experience

We're looking for candidates with strong experience across modern cloud-based data engineering environments, including:

• Strong Data Engineering background
• Databricks
• Python
• PySpark
• Apache Spark
• SQL
• AWS
• Cloud data platform experience
• Medallion Architecture (or strong practical understanding)
• Experience building scalable data pipelines and analytics models
• Familiarity with AI-assisted development or modern engineering productivity tools

Highly Desirable Experience

Experience in any of the following would be advantageous:

• Amazon EMR or Spark cluster provisioning
• Data engineering combined with analytics/model development
• Designing data products for downstream applications and business workflows
• Experience working across multiple layers of the data stack
• AI-enabled engineering practices or cloud AI frameworks

Industry Experience

Strong preference will be given to candidates with experience in:

• Insurance
• Insurance broking
• Cyber insurance
• Risk or analytics platforms within insurance

Candidates from broader Financial Services environments will also be considered if they demonstrate the ability to learn new business domains quickly.

Leadership & Personal Attributes

We're looking for someone who enjoys operating in a fast-moving, collaborative environment and can combine hands-on engineering with technical leadership.

The successful candidate will demonstrate:

• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills
• Ability to work directly with Product Owners and business stakeholders
• Confidence working through ambiguity and defining technical direction
• Ownership and accountability
• A proactive approach to problem solving
• Experience leading or mentoring engineering teams
• Ability to maintain delivery momentum across short sprint cycles
• Collaborative working style

About Korn Ferry

Korn Ferry unleashes potential in people, teams, and organizations. We work with our clients to design optimal organization structures, roles, and responsibilities. We help them hire the right people and advise them on how to reward and motivate their workforce while developing professionals as they navigate and advance their careers. To learn more, please visit Korn Ferry at www.Kornferry.com