Data Engineering Manager - Media Agency

About the team

We’re proud to work with one of the most exciting data sets in the UK. Our massive datasets, comprising billions of data points from diverse sources across the retail landscape, drive machine learning models that enhance personalisation and product recommendations. This work directly impacts millions of customers daily. In our inclusive, agile environment, you’ll have the freedom to explore, experiment, and solve real-world challenges—seeing your creations in the hands of millions across the UK.

What you'll do

• In your role, you will lead a multi-skilled data and ML engineering team to deliver innovative and high-performing solutions that create value and drive efficiency for our business. 
• With end-to-end ownership of products, you will oversee both change and run activities while owning the entire technology stack, including service management. 
• Manage the ML Engineering team and collaborate with Data Science to optimise data pipelines for feature engineering, real-time model serving, and continuous integration of machine learning models.
• Own the architectural decisions around our data infrastructure, ensuring scalability, security, and reliability of our data ecosystem, leveraging platforms such as Spark, Airflow, and Snowflake.
• Your responsibilities will include recruiting and retaining a talented team, mentoring and coaching colleagues, shaping a world-class engineering function, and ensuring the team possesses the right skills for product development. 
• Additionally, you will contribute to defining the technical direction and vision, foster communities of practise, advocate and embed agile / lean delivery methodologies, manage initiative budgets, and oversee service support and SLAs. 
• Your role will involve managing people and product financial data, meeting targets, providing accurate reporting, and seeking value realisation opportunities. 
• Overall, you will lead by example and inspire your team, continuously striving for improvement and delivering impactful solutions while maintaining attention to detail and effectively managing resources.

Who you are

We are looking for an experience technical leader:
 

• You are an experienced and passionate leader with a deep understanding of the critical role that product data plays in the success of a retailer. 
• With your technical expertise and end-to-end ownership mindset, you can drive the delivery of innovative solutions that create value, increase efficiency, and enhance performance for our business. 
• With your hands-on experience leading a ML/ Data Engineering/DevOps/Cloud environment you lead by example, inspire your teams, and ensure successful delivery of large-scale platforms. 
• Hands on experience with cloud-based data engineering platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), and familiarity with data lake architectures, stream processing, and real-time analytics frameworks is a plus.
• With an understanding of how to recruit, retain, and motivate teams, you have excellent interpersonal skills and commitment to fostering a collaborative and inclusive culture. 
• You bring cutting-edge processes and technologies to the table, always looking to enhance our engineering practises and driving the adoption of agile / lean delivery methodologies. 
• Your attention to detail, strategic mindset, and financial acumen enables you to manage budgets and optimise value realisation, while always prioritising the needs of our customers and the continuous improvement of our engineering capabilities.

#LI-FP1

We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. Think about the scale it takes for us to feed the nation. The level of data, transactions and variety it involves. Then you’ll realise that ours is a modern software engineering environment because it has to be. We’ve made serious investment into a Tech Academy and into setting standards and principles. We iterate, learn, experiment and push ways of working such as Agile, Scrum and XP. So you can look forward to awesome opportunities in everything from AI to reusable tech.

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer, so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new - whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:
 
 Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to get 10% off at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday and 15% off at Argos every pay day. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 20% of salary, depending on how we perform.  
 
 Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, pay advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an Employee Assistance Programme, you will also be eligible for private healthcare too.

Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave. 
 
 Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).