Lead Data Engineer

Accepting applications until: 25 April 2025

Job Description

Lead Data Engineer (DAX) 

 

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 new role: Lead Data Engineer 

 

Global is looking for an established Lead Data Engineer to come fill in a pivotal role in the development of new data-centric products for Global’s Digital Ad Exchange (DAX). 

This position demands a seasoned professional with a deep understanding of data architectures, engineering best practices, data governance, testing strategies, and a track record of successfully leading a data engineering team.  

The role would be reporting to the Head of Data Engineering and is a unique opportunity to continue the work to develop and maintain a robust data infrastructure that supports DAX data-driven initiatives. 

 

Key Responsibilities 

 

Design & Implementation (50%): 

• Building and maintaining key data platform capabilities, pipelines and services used across DAX. 

• Translating requirements into technical designs and planning the implementation of new features. 

• Ensuring technical solutions align with project requirements and follow industry standards and best practices. 

• Establishing comprehensive testing strategies, including unit, integration, and end-to-end testing, to ensure the reliability of data services. 

• Implementing and enforcing data governance techniques to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the data delivered. 

Leadership & Collaboration (20%): 

• Leading and mentoring a team of Data Engineers, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and technical excellence. 

• Raising the bar across the team by setting standards and best practices and demonstrating them through your own work. 

• Organising the work of the team ensuring an appropriate balance of feature delivery and platform improvements. 

• Collaborating with the other DAX and Data engineering teams and the wider Data Group. 

• Contributing to the design, implementation and maintenance of the wider data architecture, ensuring quality, scalability, reliability, durability and performance. 

Operations, Innovation & Optimisation (30%): 

• Overseeing the ongoing operational support of the pipelines and processes. 

• Implementing observability, alerting, and automated recovery mechanisms 

• Ensuring SLAs (Service Level Agreements) for data availability and reliability are met and that incidents are managed appropriately. 

• Staying updated on industry trends, researching and evaluating new tools and techniques to optimise the solutions. 

• Owning and prioritising a backlog for maintenance and improvements. 

 

 

What You’ll Love About This Role 

 

Think Big: You’ll be at the heart delivering the next evolution our DAX data platform, which will underpin critical features and insights as we grow this part of the business 

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 platform 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 the first few months, you would have: 

• Rapidly have acquired quite deep understanding of the current platform; it’s architecture, engineering challenges, work methodologies, and short/long term planning and deliverables. 

• Identified opportunities to improve resilience and efficiency of the platform and established a roadmap for enhancements. 

• Introduced best practice SDLC methodologies for testing and deploying reliable and scalable data services. 

• Fostered a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement within the team. 

• Become immersed within the DAX data domain partnering with the business to deliver trusted data products. 

• Demonstrated a commitment to researching and applying the latest tools and techniques driving engineering excellence. 

 

What You’ll Need 

 

The ideal candidate will be proactive, innovative, and committed to building reliable and well-tested solutions. 

  

Recommended Skills & Experience: 

• Strong programming skills (ideally Python) with a focus on writing testable and maintainable code. 

• Expertise in cloud services (ideally AWS and Databricks) with an emphasis on secure, scalable, and resilient data architectures. 

• Experience working with large-scale streaming data systems (e.g., Apache Kafka, Apache Spark Streaming) in particular leveraging the Databricks platform. 

• Proficiency with low-latency time-series databases (i.e. Apache Druid) 

• Proven experience in leading data teams to build and deploy highly available, distributed systems for data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL/ELT). 

• Strong understanding of monitoring and observability practices to ensure system reliability. 

• Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform), and automation testing frameworks for data engineering. 

• Ability to lead complex projects, from design stage to delivery across multiple team members. 

• Good communication skills, demonstrated in the design of solutions and technical decisions, being able to bridge the gap with non-technical stakeholders and transmitting knowledge with less experience engineers. 

• Analytical thinking with a data-driven approach to problem-solving and decision-making. 

• Coach and mentor other team members, by helping them grow and develop their skills, and demonstrating best practices. 

• Strategic delegation, evaluating the skill levels and growth potential of junior team members and assigning tasks that align with their capabilities, while eager to undertake the most complex and critical tasks. 

• Mitigate roadblocks, discovering and mitigating unknown project blocking risks. 

• Understanding of Agile methodologies and how they can be applied to drive efficiency. 

 

 

Bonus Points for: 

• Relevant Certifications 

• Ability to debug distributed architecture (K8s) 

• AdTech domain experience 

 

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.