Our client is a fast-growing international consumer brand with operations spanning multiple regions across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.
Technology and data have played a central role in the organisation's growth journey. The business has invested heavily in developing and operating core digital platforms that support a consistent and scalable operating model across its global footprint.
As the organisation continues to expand, data is becoming increasingly critical to operational excellence, business decision-making, and the development of innovative digital products and AI-driven solutions.
The Team:
The Data & AI function is responsible for building and maintaining the platform capabilities that enable the wider organisation to leverage data effectively. This includes supporting everything from data ingestion and transformation through to analytics, reporting, machine learning, and AI initiatives.
The current technology landscape includes modern cloud data platform technologies covering data warehousing, ingestion, transformation, and infrastructure automation.
The team works closely with engineering, technology, and business stakeholders across areas such as finance, operations, commercial functions, and digital product teams.
The organisation's ambition is to provide a secure, reliable, and scalable data foundation that empowers teams to build data products, reporting solutions, and AI capabilities without needing to manage the complexity of the underlying infrastructure.
While strong Data Engineering capabilities already exist across modelling, transformation, and pipeline development, there is now a strategic focus on strengthening the underlying Data Platform capability and maturing the architecture, governance, scalability, and operational excellence of the platform.
To support this journey, we are seeking a Lead Data Platform Engineer.
The Opportunity:
This is a key technical leadership role responsible for the ownership, evolution, and operational excellence of the organisation's data platform.
The successful candidate will combine hands-on engineering expertise with strategic technical leadership, taking responsibility for platform architecture, infrastructure, reliability, security, governance, automation, and engineering best practices.
Whilst Data Engineers focus primarily on data ingestion, transformation, and business-facing data solutions, this role is focused on ensuring the platform itself remains scalable, secure, reliable, automated, and cost-efficient.
You will play a pivotal role in shaping the future direction of the data platform, balancing immediate business needs with long-term architectural strategy and ensuring the platform continues to support future growth.
Working closely with Engineering teams, IT, Data & AI leadership, external partners, and business stakeholders, you will help build and operate a modern, enterprise-scale data ecosystem.
Key Responsibilities:
Platform Architecture & Engineering
- Own and evolve the architecture of a modern cloud-based data platform.
- Design, develop, and maintain platform infrastructure using Infrastructure-as-Code principles.
- Establish and promote engineering standards, platform best practices, and deployment approaches.
- Enhance CI/CD, DataOps, automation, and platform engineering capabilities.
- Implement monitoring, logging, alerting, and observability across critical services and workloads.
- Improve platform reliability, resilience, incident management, and recovery processes.
- Optimise platform performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
- Drive security initiatives including IAM, RBAC, secrets management, and service account governance.
- Develop reusable platform capabilities that accelerate delivery across Data Engineering teams.
- Assess emerging technologies and identify opportunities to improve platform effectiveness.
Technical Leadership & Platform Strategy
- Act as the technical authority for the data platform and help define its future roadmap.
- Translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions and platform capabilities.
- Make pragmatic architectural decisions that balance speed, reliability, maintainability, and cost.
- Drive platform modernisation and improvements in operational maturity.
- Establish governance frameworks and engineering guardrails that support innovation while maintaining stability and security.
Stakeholder Engagement
- Partner with technical and business stakeholders to understand platform priorities and requirements.
- Build strong relationships across both technical and non-technical teams.
- Communicate platform strategy, risks, dependencies, and trade-offs clearly and effectively.
- Serve as a trusted advisor on platform-related decisions and technical direction.
- Provide visibility on platform performance, reliability, security, and optimisation initiatives.
- Influence decision-making through clear articulation of technical recommendations and business value.
Governance & Decision Making
- Define architectural standards, governance frameworks, and engineering policies.
- Evaluate technologies, vendors, and platform solutions against business and technical requirements.
- Drive standardisation to reduce operational complexity and technical debt.
- Ensure compliance with security, privacy, and risk management standards.
- Define and monitor platform KPIs related to performance, reliability, efficiency, and maturity.
- Lead architectural reviews and key technical decision-making processes.
- Mentor engineers on platform engineering, automation, operational excellence, and best practices.
- Promote a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
- Lead technical discussions and support teams in making effective platform-related decisions.
What We're Looking For
Technical Expertise
- Proven experience in Data Platform Engineering, Data Engineering, Cloud Engineering, or related disciplines.
- Proven experience owning and operating production-grade data platforms and critical infrastructure.
- Strong understanding of modern cloud-based data architectures covering ingestion, storage, transformation, orchestration, and analytics.
- Extensive experience with cloud data warehouse technologies.
- Hands-on experience with Infrastructure-as-Code tooling such as Terraform.
- Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines and modern DevOps practices.
- Strong knowledge of cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
- Experience implementing monitoring, observability, and alerting capabilities.
- Proven ability to optimise platform performance, reliability, and operational costs.
- Strong Python and SQL skills, alongside experience with source control and software engineering practices.
- Experience with modern data transformation frameworks and tooling.
Leadership & Stakeholder Management
- Demonstrated ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to simplify complex technical concepts.
- Experience building credibility and trust with senior stakeholders.
- Ability to manage competing priorities and make effective risk-based decisions.
- Strong stakeholder management, facilitation, and relationship-building skills.
- Confidence to challenge assumptions and guide strategic discussions.
Strategic & Commercial Awareness
- Ability to assess technology decisions through both technical and commercial lenses.
- Strong understanding of platform economics, cost optimisation, and operational efficiency.
- Experience developing technology roadmaps and long-term platform strategies.
- Ability to connect technical initiatives to measurable business outcomes.
- Experience working with high-volume, transactional, or consumer-facing data environments.
- Knowledge of modern observability platforms.
- Experience with metadata management, data lineage, data quality, and observability solutions.
- Exposure to large-scale platform transformation or modernisation programmes.
What Success Looks Like:
Success in this position will be measured not only through platform reliability and technical excellence, but also through the ability to influence stakeholders, improve engineering maturity, drive platform adoption, and ensure the data ecosystem continues to deliver tangible business value.
The successful candidate will be a hands-on technical leader who combines strong engineering capability with strategic thinking, helping shape the future of a modern, data-driven organisation.