Head of Data Engineering & Architecture

Company Description

We are champions of rail, inspired to build a greener, more sustainable future of travel. Trainline enables millions of travellers to find and book the best value tickets across carriers, fares, and journey options through our highly rated mobile app, website, and B2B partner channels. 

Great journeys start with Trainline 🚄 

Now Europe’s number 1 downloaded rail app, with over 125 million monthly visits and £5.3 billion in annual ticket sales, we collaborate with 270+ rail and coach companies in over 40 countries. We want to create a world where travel is as simple, seamless, and affordable as it should be. 

Today, we're a FTSE 250 company driven by our incredible team of over 1,000 Trainliners from 50+ nationalities, based across London, Paris, Barcelona, Milan, Edinburgh, Berlin, Madrid, and Brussels. With our focus on growth in the UK and Europe, now is the perfect time to join us on this high-speed journey. 

Job Description

We are recruiting for an experienced Head of Data Engineering & Architecture to build a world-class Data Engineering function and data platform, owning both strategy and delivery for Data Engineering as a discipline along with the vision, roadmap, operations and cost of the Data platform and associated products. 

As Head of Data Engineering and Architecture you will... 🚄   

• Lead the org of circa. 30 Data Engineers and Data Engineering Managers. 
• Set the vision and strategy for the Data Engineering function and driving necessary organisational change to achieve the vision. 
• Set the vision, technology blueprint, architecture and roadmap of the Data Platform.  
• Ensure delivery of OKRs for Data and vertical Data Product Teams. 
• Architect our analytical data stores to maximise productivity and efficiency for data consumers with effective metrics and data marts.  
• Ensure that our data assets are discoverable, documented and readily accessible to consumers and appropriately protected. 
• Engage and nurture the Data Engineering teams to drive and foster a high engagement culture. 
• Manage the costs of data systems and 3rd party suppliers within the current FY budget and accurately forecasting the next FY budget. 
• Define and implement effective ways of working for delivery teams and ensuring these are embedded. 
• Influence the direction of our technology platforms so that they are aligned to the needs of delivery teams and driving adoption of new technologies. 
• Embed high standards of engineering excellence in delivery teams. 
• Define effective operational processes and ensuring that teams embed these processes and achieve operational performance targets for availability, performance, security, on call rotas, incident management etc. 
• Ensure the Data Engineering function engages with regulatory, audit or compliance teams and processes and achieves compliance with relevant policies in Data Governance, security, privacy and IT controls. 
• Coordinate larger cross-team projects or programmes within the Data function and ensure that we have governance in place to manage delivery. 

We'd love to hear from you if you... 🔍 

• Thrive in a diverse, open and collaborative environment. 
• Have experience managing multiple teams of Data Engineers. 
• Are in expert in data engineering infrastructure, technologies and practices. 
• Have deep expertise in data modelling and warehouse design in the modern, lake house era.  
• Are an experienced and committed people manager with technical leadership experience. 
• Are passionate about agile software delivery with a track record of leading effective agile and lean software teams. 
• Have a strong background in DevOps deploying, managing and maintaining services using Airflow, Docker, Terraform and AWS CLI tools to achieve infrastructure-as-code and automated deployments. 
• Have excellent knowledge of AWS services (ECS, IAM, EC2, S3, DynamoDB, MSK). 

Our Technology Stack 💻 

• Python and Scala 
• Starburst and Athena 
• Kafka and Kinesis 
• DataHub 
• ML Flow and Airflow 
• Docker and Terraform 
• Kafka, Spark, Kafka Streams and KSQL 
• DBT 
• AWS, S3, Iceberg, Parquet, Glue and EMR for our Data Lake 
• Elasticsearch and DynamoDB 

Additional Information

Enjoy fantastic perks like private healthcare & dental insurance, a generous work from abroad policy, 2-for-1 share purchase plans, extra festive time off, and excellent family-friendly benefits. 

We prioritise career growth with clear career paths, transparent pay bands, personal learning budgets, and regular learning days. Jump on board and supercharge your career from day one! 

Our values represent the things that matter most to us and what we live and breathe everyday, in everything we do: 

• 💭 Think Big - We're building the future of rail 
• ✔️ Own It - We focus on every customer, partner and journey 
• 🤝  Travel Together - We're one team 
• ♻️ Do Good - We make a positive impact 

Interested in finding out more about what it's like to work at Trainline? Why not check us out on LinkedIn, Instagram and Glassdoor!