Senior Data Engineer

Accepting applications until: 30 April 2025

Job Description

Senior Data Engineer

We are Global

At Global, we think big, work hard, and never stand still. We’re the proud home of the best media and entertainment, driven by our talented and passionate people. Our mission? To make everyone’s day brighter — our Globallers, our audiences, our partners, and our communities. Whether we’re in the studio, building world-class technology, or securing record Outdoor advertising partnerships, we make sure we’re doing it as a team.

Your Role: Senior Data Engineer

We’re one of the largest media players in Europe, and data is at the heart of what we do. We capture data from our audio and digital channels, from our extensive outdoor business and beyond, and use this to create the best content for our audiences and an amazing experience for our clients.

The data team supports the whole company across all of these areas, and this scope gives us a rich array of data use cases to work on. These range from personalisation on our digital applications, to optimisation algorithms to allocate our inventory, to data for enabling operational excellence in our outdoor estate, generative technologies to develop ad creatives, and many others.

Three things set us apart:

• Distinctive problems to solve: As described above, we have some of the most diverse and rich data use cases for any media company. We’re the only player to cut across audio, outdoor, digital, and to run a programmatic ad exchange

• Unique data sets: In line with the above, we have some truly unique data sets to work with – and at large scale. This includes our front-end data, data from our ad exchange, outdoor operational data, audio listening data, and much more. It also includes some unique data partnerships: for example, we have access to unique data on travel movements for the TfL network in London

• Scale: We’re a privately-owned, mid-cap business, with a long-term perspective. We have the flexibility, pace, and opportunity to work on big problems that an early-stage business would. But equally, we have the scale to make an impact on millions of consumers, and the big data volumes you’d expect of a large business

We’re looking for a Senior Data Engineer with strong technical and communication skills to join our team. In this role you’d play a key role in maturing and evolving our data platform. Through doing this, you’d be delivering valuable use cases to the business including making use of our rich content and partnership data to build new audience segments for targeting, attribution, and more.

Key Responsibilities

• Building and evolving our data platform, including introducing improved platform capabilities for areas including monitoring & alerting, automation, and data quality profiling. We’d also look for your insight on how we should best evolve our platform in future

• Delivering new use cases with a focus on engineering excellence, building high quality solutions and raising the bar for others

• Coaching and supporting - While this is a hands-on role, you’ll be a technical leader in the team. As such, we’d look for you to coach and guide junior engineers who you work closely with

What You’ll Love About This Role

Think Big: You’ll be at the heart of designing how we evolve our data platform, which will underpin critical business decisions and insights for Global’s future

Own It: You’ll be doing this by leading technical delivery on some of our most important use cases

Keep it Simple: We’ve got some of the largest and most diverse data sets in UK media – with scale that continues to grow. You’ll play a leading role in how we enable our platforms to meet this scaling challenge while remaining reliable, maintainable, and cost-effective

Better Together: You’ll be part of a diverse data team, and have an opportunity to work alongside highly talented engineers, data scientists, and data analysts to deliver our most important business outcomes

What Success Looks Like

In your first few months, you’ll have:

• Got to know our platform architecture, and formed ideas on how we can improve this in future

• Delivered some early contributions to use cases you’ll be working on and the data sets that enable them, with an eye on any potential improvements

• Applied sound standard methodology in deploying data services, appreciating potential impact to scalability, reliability, accuracy, efficiency and costs

• Shown understanding of how and why data services are applied at Global, and how we can use our data here for improved targeting, attribution, and more

What You’ll Need

• Programming skills and knowledge of SQL. We’d expect you to be highly proficient in a modern programming language (we primarily use Python), and to be proficient in SQL.  Exposure to data engineering tools like dbt is also an advantage.

• Applied data engineering knowledge, including understanding of building and deploying high quality pipelines, that are robust, supportable and maintainable and consider our NFRs

• Experience with modern data platform technologies. We use Snowflake as core of our platform, so experience here is preferred

• Familiarity with cloud services, ideally AWS

• Experience working in an agile way striving for continuous improvement with an appreciation for how these methodologies can improve efficiency and deliver value

Creating a place we all belong at Global

We are dedicated to creating a place where different voices are represented, amplified and celebrated. We know that we can’t serve our diverse audiences without first celebrating it in our people, which is why we’re passionate about creating an inclusive culture where every Globaller can belong. So, no matter who you are or where you are from, you can find your place at Global. 

As a business, we believe in the importance of a healthy work-life balance and the value of a flexible and agile workforce. Therefore, we operate a Smart Working approach. If you need us to make any reasonable adjustments during your recruitment process, drop us an email at recruitment@global.com, we’ll be happy to help.