Senior Data Engineer in Salford

CreateFuture is fast becoming the UK’s most recognisable digital consultancy, with years of experience building digital products and services for major organisations whilst putting our people first. We have offices in the centre of Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, and London as well as remote employees located throughout the country.

We're looking for an experienced Senior Data Engineer to join our growing Data Practice. You'll work as part of a multidisciplinary team delivering data solutions for some of the world's largest betting and gaming operators — organisations processing millions of events per day across sportsbook, casino, and exchange platforms. This is a role for someone who understands the pressures of the iGaming data landscape: sub-second odds feeds, high-stakes data integrity requirements, complex regulatory reporting, and large-scale platform migrations from legacy on-premises estates to cloud-native architectures on AWS.

What You'll Be Doing

• Deliver large-scale data migrations from on-premises or legacy platforms to cloud-native AWS architectures, including Lakehouse implementations using Databricks or Snowflake.
• Design, build, and optimise low-latency data pipelines that process real-time betting events, odds updates, and market data at scale.
• Implement robust data quality, validation, reconciliation, and audit controls across betting, trading, and customer data domains.
• Develop streaming and micro-batch data solutions using AWS Kinesis, Apache Kafka, or Amazon MSK to support real-time sportsbook and in-play data feeds.
• Build and maintain data solutions using AWS services including S3, Glue, Lambda, Athena, Redshift, Lake Formation, Step Functions, and MWAA.
• Support regulatory and compliance reporting by ensuring data pipelines are reliable, traceable, and meet audit and lineage requirements for the UK Gambling Commission and other international regulators.
• Collaborate with architects, platform engineers, and cross-functional teams to design scalable, resilient, and high-performing data platforms.
• Champion engineering best practices through high-quality code, automated testing, documentation, and peer code reviews, while mentoring junior engineers where appropriate.
• Contribute technical expertise during solution design sessions, architecture discussions, and client workshops, providing input into delivery approaches and technical decisions.

We'd love to talk to you if...

• You know the iGaming data landscape.
• You've worked in or closely with sportsbook, exchange, or casino platforms — and understand the data models behind markets, selections, bets, and settlements.
• You've built or maintained low-latency data feeds — odds ingestion, in-play event streams, price change feeds — where milliseconds matter.
• You understand the data integrity challenges specific to betting: reconciliation between trading and settlement systems, detection of data drift, and auditability for regulatory purposes.
• You've delivered or contributed to large-scale data migrations — moving high-volume transactional or event data from legacy estates to the cloud without losing fidelity or uptime.

You're strong on AWS data engineering

• AWS is your primary cloud — you're confident across Glue, Lambda, Athena, S3, Redshift, RDS, Kinesis, MSK, and Step Functions.
• You've built real-time or near-real-time pipelines using streaming frameworks — Kinesis Data Streams, Kafka, Flink, or Spark Streaming.
• You understand AWS cost models and how to optimise high-throughput workloads — Spot compute, reserved capacity, and right-sizing for event-driven architectures.
• AWS certifications are a bonus.

You know your tools

• Solid experience with Python, SQL, and Spark — and pipeline tools such as dbt or Airflow.
• Comfortable with data quality frameworks and testing — Great Expectations, dbt tests, or custom validation layers.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, AWS CDK) is a plus.
• Familiar with broader cloud platforms — Azure (Data Factory, Synapse) or GCP (Dataflow, BigQuery) — is beneficial but not essential.

Tech snapshot

• Primary Cloud: AWS — Glue, Lambda, Athena, S3, Redshift, RDS, Kinesis, MSK, Lake Formation, Step Functions, MWAA.
• Streaming: AWS Kinesis, Apache Kafka / MSK, Apache Flink, Spark Streaming.
• Languages: Python, SQL, Spark.
• Pipeline tools: dbt, Airflow / AWS MWAA, AWS Glue.
• Platforms: Databricks, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift.
• Data quality: Great Expectations, dbt tests, custom reconciliation frameworks.
• IaC / DevOps: Terraform, AWS CDK (desirable).

What We’ll Offer You

We trust people to do their best work. That means flexibility over rigid rules, impact over activity, and real investment in your growth both professionally and personally. You’ll be part of a supportive, and friendly culture, surrounded by smart, curious people who care deeply about what they do. We offer flexible working, including hybrid and remote options. Our office hubs are located in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, London and Bulgaria, with occasional travel to client sites or CreateFuture offices when needed. We trust you to manage your time balancing collaboration with client time and focused work. What matters is the impact you have, not how busy you look.

Our hiring process

We try to keep our hiring process clear, fair and respectful of your time. We aim to get back to everyone who applies and we will be upfront about where you are in the process. It Usually Looks Like This:

• Call with our Talent Acquisition Team.
• Role specific capability interview.
• Depending on the role, we might also ask you to do a short presentation, a practical or technical task or have a values focused conversation. We will explain what is involved before anything happens.

Inclusion at CreateFuture

We believe diverse teams build better workplaces and better products. We want CreateFuture to be a place where people feel able to be themselves and do their best work.