Job Purpose
The Lead Data Engineer is responsible for the technical design, delivery and implementation of data solutions within the IT estate. The role achieves this through a combination of exceptional technical ability and inspirational leadership.. The Lead Data Engineer works closely with the data engineering leadership team and wider stakeholders to deliver IT change that help easyJet be the leading data driven airline.
Job Accountabilities
Serve as the technical expert responsible for designing and delivering production-grade data solutions to support the breadth of use-cases across the business.
Champion the distributed data platform and drive Data Product adoption, ensuring the data assets are catalogued to enable consumers to understand what is available, where they exist and how to gain easy access to data.
Provide direct line management to a small team of Data Engineers. This includes managing their personal development, providing technical support and guidance, and ensuring their work meets the required standards.
Work within cross functional teams of internal and external personnel to deliver data solutions at an enterprise level.
Identify new and emerging technology, methods, trends and techniques in the Data Engineering space; assess and communicate
Work directly with Data Science and Analytics to identify existing or future opportunities to deliver end-to-end data product solutions that drive business value.
Responsible for ensuring Data Engineering solution designs meet the relevant functional and non-functional requirements and adhere to the wider IT technical standards.
Responsible for verifying requirements, defining the Data Engineering components, developing an implementation and QA approach, manging technical debt, and providing thought leadership for all data solutions.
Work with the Data Engineering Leadership team to identify and implement internal process improvements, such as automating manual processes, optimising data solution delivery and improving our ways of working.
Apply appropriate risk mitigation actions by regularly reviewing those controls in place and processes/activities within your remit. (e.g. maintain Data Engineering risk register)
Key Skills & Behaviours Required
Leadership; lead your team by example and inspire those around you. Help your team understand the vision and how their work contributes to the wider easyJet organisation.
Team management; understand and encourage working in an agile model, supporting and leading onshore and offshore data engineers. Identify and implement improvements (technical or otherwise) to make the data engineering teams more effective.
Clear communication; can communicate effectively in both written and verbal forms with technical and non-technical audiences alike.
Complex problem-solving ability; structured, organised, process-driven and outcome-oriented. Able to use historical experiences to help with future innovations.
Passionate about technology; enjoy being hands-on and learning about new technologies, particularly in the data field.
Self-directed and independent; able to take general guidance and the overarching data strategy and identify practical steps to take.
Technical Skills Required
Solid understanding of data concepts and data modelling principles; applied across traditional warehousing, OLTP and modern data lakes.
Significant experience designing and building data solutions on a cloud based, big data distributed system.
Significant experience with Python, and experience with modern software development and release engineering practices (e.g. TDD, CI/CD).
Significant experience with Apache Spark or any other distributed data programming frameworks (e.g. Flink, Arrow, MapR).
Good understanding of software engineering principles.
Strong SQL background – comfortable writing efficient SQL.
Experience working with a range of cloud-based big data technologies (e.g. HDFS, Blob Storage, Spark, Kafka, Delta, Hive, Oozie, NiFi).
Experience using enterprise scheduling tools (e.g. Apache Airflow, Spring DataFlow, Control-M)
Experience with Linux and containerisation.
Cloud computing experience (AWS, GCP, Azure)
Experience with supporting big data cloud-based applications in Production (e.g. administration, configuration management, deployment, monitoring, debugging, and performance tuning).
Understanding of Data Management principles (security and data privacy) and how they can be applied to Data Engineering processes/solutions (e.g. access management, data privacy, handling of sensitive data (e.g. GDPR))
Understanding of Data Science Tooling for ML (e.g. MLFlow, Sagemaker), Data Analytics Tooling for dashboarding/visualisation (e.g. Tableau, Looker, Power BI) and interactive API’s/Web Apps (e.g. R-Studio, Shiny, Flask, Django).
DESIRABLE
Airline experience
Worked on regulatory/data privacy requirements in a data lake architecture, e.g. GDPR data handling
Cloud-based OLAP experience – building and deploying cubes.
Provisioning infra-as-code automatically – serverless data pipelines. (GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Terraform)
Worked with modern lakehouse platforms – e.g. Databricks, Snowflake
Solution architecture background – thinking beyond the data layer.
Data Lake migrations away from Hadoop into the cloud.
What You’ll Get In Return
- Competitive base salary
- Up to 20% bonus
- 25 days holiday
- BAYE, SAYE & Performance share schemes
- 7% pension
- Life Insurance
- Flexible benefits package
- Excellent staff travel benefits
About EasyJet
At easyJet our aim is to make low cost travel easy – connecting people to what they value using Europe’s best airline network, great value fares, and friendly service.
It takes a real team effort to carry over 90 million passengers a year across 35 countries. Whether you’re working as part of our front line operations or in our corporate functions, you’ll find people that are positive, inclusive, ready to take on a challenge, and that have your back. We call that our ‘Orange Spirit’, and we hope you’ll share that too.
Apply
Complete your application on our careers site.
We encourage individuality, empower our people to seize the initiative, and never stop learning. We see people first and foremost for their performance and potential and we are committed to building a diverse and inclusive organisation that supports the needs of all. As such we will make reasonable adjustments at interview through to employment for our candidates.
Business Area
Data
Primary Location
United Kingdom-London-London Luton Airport
Organisation
Data
Schedule
Full-time
Unposting Date
Ongoing
