Senior Data Engineer
Location: Hybrid (UK-based)
Team: Product Engineering
Contract: Permanent
Salary: Starting salary £50,000 with scope to increase based on experience and suitability
Your next chapter
Travel Chapter is a data-led business, and the work our teams do behind the scenes directly shapes the experience of our guests, property owners and colleagues.
We’re looking for a Senior Data Engineer to join our Product Engineering team and play a key role in designing, building and evolving Travel Chapter’s data platform and warehouse.
You’ll build robust, scalable and maintainable data solutions, transforming data from across the organisation into trusted, well-modelled datasets that support analytics, reporting, operational processes and data-driven products.
This is a great opportunity for an experienced data engineer who enjoys taking ownership, solving complex problems and helping shape how data is used across a growing organisation.
Working closely with Data, Product Engineering and stakeholders across the business, you’ll help define engineering standards, improve the reliability and quality of our data, and support the development of other engineers through coaching and knowledge sharing.
The role
As a Senior Data Engineer, you’ll be responsible for designing, building and maintaining data pipelines, ETL processes and data models that bring together diverse data sources into a reliable and unified data platform.
You’ll contribute to architectural and data‑modelling decisions, champion good engineering practices and help ensure our data solutions are scalable, maintainable and fit for purpose.
You’ll work closely with product managers, developers, data colleagues and stakeholders across the business to understand requirements and how data is used, turning these needs into effective technical solutions.
You’ll also have the opportunity to influence how we work as a team — from improving engineering standards and tackling technical debt to mentoring colleagues and continuously improving our data platform.
What you’ll be doing
- Making and documenting architectural and data‑modelling decisions
- Developing and maintaining data pipelines and ETL processes to integrate and transform diverse data sources
- Designing and implementing data models and database schemas for large volumes of structured and unstructured data
- Building robust, scalable and maintainable data solutions that support analytics, reporting, operational processes and data‑driven products
- Championing engineering standards across SQL, Python, testing, documentation and code review
- Reviewing designs and code produced by other engineers
- Identifying and addressing technical debt and opportunities to improve the data platform
- Optimising data solutions using techniques such as partitioning, indexing and caching
- Developing and maintaining data quality processes to ensure data is accurate, complete and consistent
- Improving the reliability, observability and performance of data solutions
- Working collaboratively with product managers, developers and stakeholders to define data requirements and understand how data is used
- Diagnosing and resolving performance and production issues, putting measures in place to prevent recurrence where possible
- Coaching and mentoring engineers and helping to raise engineering capability across the team
- Keeping up to date with developments in data engineering and evaluating new technologies and practices where they could benefit the organisation
- Participating in the team’s out-of-hours support rota where required, in accordance with agreed support arrangements and SLAs
What we’re looking for
Essential experience
- Strong commercial data engineering experience, ideally in a senior or lead capacity
- Significant experience delivering production data engineering solutions
- Advanced SQL and an excellent understanding of databases
- Strong Python skills for data engineering
- Strong understanding of data warehousing and dimensional/data modelling
- Experience designing and operating production data pipelines
- Experience with a modern cloud data warehouse such as Snowflake, BigQuery or Redshift
- Experience with automated testing, version control and CI/CD
- Strong understanding of data quality, reliability and observability
- Experience diagnosing performance and production issues
- Ability to make, document and communicate technical design decisions
- Experience mentoring or supporting other engineers
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Desirable experience
- Experience with Snowflake, dbt or Fivetran
- Experience working with AWS / Glue
- Experience with MySQL or SQL Server
- Experience with Salesforce
- Familiarity with JSON and data integration formats
The skills that matter here
- Ownership – you take responsibility from problem definition through to production operation and care about the outcome, not just the delivery
- Pragmatism – you understand that good engineering balances quality, business value, risk and delivery
- Communication – you can explain complex data and technical concepts clearly to both technical and non‑technical audiences
- Collaboration – you enjoy working across Data, Engineering, Product and the wider business to find the best solutions
- Continuous improvement – you look for ways to improve systems, processes and engineering practices rather than simply maintaining the status quo
- Curiosity – you want to understand the bigger picture and how data can create better experiences and better business decisions
- Quality mindset – you take pride in building reliable, well‑tested and maintainable solutions
Why join Travel Chapter?
We’re proud to be a B Corp certified, people‑first business, bringing together local expertise and innovative technology to create unforgettable holidays.
You’ll join a collaborative product environment where your work genuinely makes an impact. We value learning, curiosity, quality and people who take ownership of the work they do.
As a Senior Data Engineer, you’ll have the opportunity to influence the direction of our data platform, work with a broad range of technologies and help shape the engineering practices we use across the team.