Data Platform Engineer in Cheadle

At APS Group, Data Platform Engineers build and maintain the foundation of our data-driven organisation. You design, operate, and evolve the shared platform, tooling, and infrastructure that enable secure, scalable, and reliable access to data across the business. You work at the intersection of software engineering, data, and cloud architecture. Together with BI teams, product owners, domain teams, and platform engineers, you create the standards, patterns, and capabilities that allow operational and enrichment data to be turned into structured and trusted assets for reporting, automation, and product development.

Within APS, the Data Platform team plays a central role in the future of our technology landscape. The platform you help shape will support upcoming agentic and AI-driven functionalities by ensuring that data is consistently reliable, well-structured, and accessible across domains. Our approach to data focuses on reliability, transparency, and reuse. We emphasise automation, observability, and continuous improvement in everything we build.

Your work environment: You will be part of the Data Platform Engineering team, working closely with:

• BI and analytics teams that consume and model data
• Domain teams that produce operational data
• Platform Engineering for infrastructure and reliability
• Product Owners to balance business priorities and platform evolution

Within this setup, you contribute to a shared data platform that supports multiple domains and teams. You will build the platform, tooling, and standards that enable others to ingest and consume data efficiently and safely. You take ownership within your scope while actively collaborating across team boundaries. We value clear communication, pragmatic decision-making, and a strong engineering mindset. There is room to experiment with modern tooling, as long as it leads to measurable improvements in reliability, scalability, or developer experience.

What you will do:

• Design, build, and evolve the Data Platform used by multiple teams and domains
• Create reusable patterns, tooling, and standards for building data pipelines and data products
• Own and improve the reliability, scalability, and observability of the data platform
• Improve self-service capabilities so teams can onboard, ingest, transform, and publish data independently
• Automate platform workflows including provisioning, testing, deployment, and monitoring
• Collaborate with domain and analytics teams to remove friction and improve the developer experience
• Design and evolve data models that support analytics and operational use cases
• Collaborate with stakeholders to ensure data is usable, reliable, and well understood

Skills and experience:

We are looking for a candidate who displays many of the following skills, but we understand candidates are stronger in some areas than others and no one would be expected to meet all criteria:

• Experience designing and operating data platforms or shared data infrastructure in production environments
• Strong proficiency in Python and SQL
• Experience with cloud platforms, preferably AWS (e.g. S3, Glue, Redshift, Lambda)
• Solid understanding of data warehousing concepts such as data lakes, dimensional modelling, and event-driven architectures
• Experience with ELT/ETL tooling and orchestration frameworks
• Familiarity with data quality, monitoring, and observability practices
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code, automation, and CI/CD practices
• Experience with version control (Git) and collaborative workflows
• Working knowledge of database systems (PostgreSQL, MS SQL, or similar)
• You think in terms of platforms, reuse, and standardisation rather than one-off solutions
• You take ownership of your work and aim for reliable, maintainable solutions
• You are comfortable troubleshooting data issues and improving existing pipelines
• You balance speed with quality and understand the impact of your work on downstream users
• You enjoy reducing complexity for others through good abstractions and tooling

Collaboration and communication:

• You communicate clearly about progress, trade-offs, and issues
• You work effectively across teams and disciplines
• You understand how data is used and design platform capabilities accordingly
• You contribute to documentation, standards and knowledge sharing

What we look for:

• A few years of experience in platform engineering, data engineering or a similar role
• Experience contributing to shared infrastructure or internal platforms
• A pragmatic and structured way of working
• Curiosity to improve the platform and explore better approaches
• A team-oriented mindset with a focus on shared outcomes

We’re an equal opportunities employer. If you need this information in a different format, contact us at the same email or call +44 (0)161 495 4500. All appointments are subject to DBS and financial checks.