Engineering Tech Lead

Job Title: Engineering Tech Lead
Location: Sheffield (Hybrid)
Salary/Rate: Up to £537 per day
Start Date: Feb 2026
Job Type: 6-month contract (Inside IR35)

Company Introduction:
We are currently recruiting for an Engineering Tech Lead with experience in Data Engineering, OpenShift Telemetry, Kafka, Splunk, and LLM to join our global client in the financial services sector.

Job Responsibilities/Objectives:

. Design, implement, and maintain data pipelines to ingest and process OpenShift telemetry (metrics, logs, traces) at scale.
. Stream OpenShift telemetry via Kafka (producers, topics, schemas) and build resilient consumer services for transformation and enrichment.
. Engineer data models and routing for multi-tenant observability; ensure lineage, quality, and SLAs across the stream layer.
. Integrate processed telemetry into Splunk for visualisation, dashboards, alerting, and analytics to achieve observability Level 4 (proactive insights).
. Implement schema management (Avro/Protobuf), governance, and versioning for telemetry events.
. Build automated validation, replay, and backfill mechanisms for data reliability and recovery.
. Instrument services with OpenTelemetry; standardise tracing, metrics, and structured logging across platforms.
. Use LLMs to enhance observability capabilities (eg, query assistance, anomaly summarisation, runbook generation).
. Collaborate with platform, SRE, and application teams to integrate telemetry, alerts, and SLOs.
. Ensure security, compliance, and best practices for data pipelines and observability platforms.
. Document data flows, schemas, dashboards, and operational runbooks.

Required Skills/Experience:

. Hands-on experience building streaming data pipelines with Kafka (producers/consumers, schema registry, Kafka Connect/KSQL/KStream).
. Proficiency with OpenShift/Kubernetes telemetry (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus) and CLI tooling.
. Experience integrating telemetry into Splunk (HEC, UF, sourcetypes, CIM), building dashboards and alerting.
. Strong data engineering skills in Python (or similar) for ETL/ELT, enrichment, and validation.
. Knowledge of event schemas (Avro/Protobuf/JSON), contracts, and backward/forward compatibility.
. Familiarity with observability standards and practices; ability to drive toward Level 4 maturity (proactive monitoring, automated insights).
. Understanding of hybrid cloud and multi-cluster telemetry patterns.
. Security and compliance for data pipelines: secret management, RBAC, encryption in transit/at rest.
. Good problem-solving skills and ability to work in a collaborative team environment.
. Strong communication and documentation skills.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please apply now with your updated CV in Microsoft Word/PDF format.

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.