Senior Data Platform Engineer in London

Data is at the heart of what we do. Depop is looking for a Senior Data Platform Engineer to help architect, build, and scale our data platform, empowering teams with self‑serve capabilities. You'll combine hands‑on technical expertise with strategic thinking to shape the foundation that supports our products and customers, enabling teams to own, process, query, and manage their data with efficiency and ease. You will work closely with people from a wide variety of domains, as well as our Insights, Analytics Engineers, Data Scientists, MLOps, MarTech and other Data Engineering teams. You will help manage our growing data needs and support increasingly complex business problems by building and promoting self‑service tools and data best practices that will be used across the organisation, including taking ownership of our data transformation and orchestration tooling; batch and streaming infrastructure and exploration tools (Databricks, Airflow, dbt) and look after our Datalake (ingestion, storage, governance, privacy). You'll work with a modern, cutting‑edge data stack and play a key role in shaping data‑as‑a‑product practices. As we scale to meet Depop's bold growth ambitions, you'll help introduce the next generation of data capabilities.

What You’ll Do

• Pave a path for data as product: Champion data as a first‑class citizen by introducing robust data observability and governance tooling into the platform.
• Software Engineering: Develop microservices, libraries, data pipelines.
• Technical Design: Implement and evolve platform services that enable teams to work with data efficiently and securely, using modern tooling such as Terraform, Docker, and cloud‑native patterns.
• Lead Technological Initiatives: Lead initiatives working with end users: data scientists, ML engineers, analytics engineers, product engineers and beyond to enable, support and accelerate their data needs, embracing a platform as product attitude.
• Uphold operational excellence: Automating infrastructure and monitoring, leading incident response and root cause analysis, and continuously improving the health and performance of our data platform. Champion scalable standard processes through automation, clear documentation, and knowledge sharing via tutorials and training sessions.
• Stakeholder Collaboration: Work closely with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders to define, design, and implement solutions within our Data Platform. Trusted relationships will be key for success.
• Invest in others' growth: Mentoring and sharing knowledge, helping elevate technical standards and fostering a culture of continuous improvement.
• Build on engineering culture: Take an active role in improving the engineering culture at Depop and encourage others around you to follow these values.

What You’ll Bring

• Advanced knowledge in a high‑level programming language (e.g. Python, Scala) with proven foundation in software engineering best practices - testing, clean coding standards, code reviews, pair programming, automation‑first mindset.
• Experience delivering data compliance & privacy solutions ensuring that we uphold data subject rights for our customers.
• Experience introducing a data governance & observability stack enabling rich data lineage, data contracts, SLA/SLO, tagging and data quality monitoring capabilities both on our own platform but also for data owners.
• Proven experience designing, building, and scaling data platforms and backend infrastructure in production environments - have worked to enable advanced data users: ML Engineers, analysts, analytics engineers and have a strong grasp of their needs and how they operate.
• Big data technologies, with expertise in tools & platforms such as Airflow, dbt, Kafka, Databricks and data observability & catalogue solutions (e.g. Monte Carlo, Atlan, Datahub).
• Cloud Platform Proficiency: Familiarity with AWS, GCP, or Microsoft Azure, with hands‑on experience building scalable, reliable data solutions on cloud platforms.
• A passion for learning new things and keeping on top of the latest developments and technologies in our field. We take pride in our learning and make sure to have dedicated time set aside for our growth and development (we offer personal development time and other platforms to share knowledge with your peers).

Nice to Have

• Knowledge of systems design within a modern cloud‑based environment (AWS, GCP) including AWS primitives such as IAM, S3, RDS, EMR, ECS and more.
• Advanced experience working and understanding the tradeoffs of at least one of the following Data Lake table/file formats: Delta Lake, Parquet, Iceberg, Hudi.
• Previous hands‑on expertise with Spark.
• Experience working with containerisation technologies - Docker, Kubernetes.
• Streaming Knowledge: Experience with Kafka/Flink or other streaming ecosystems, with a solid understanding of their components.
• DevOps experience building CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins), IaC (Terraform).
• Direct experience contributing to projects involving lakehouse / medallion architectures in Databricks.

Additional information

• Health + Mental Wellbeing: PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa, subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space.
• Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative.
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support.
• Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting.
• Work/Life Balance: 25 days annual leave with option to carry over up to 5 days, 1 company‑wide day off per quarter, impact hours: Up to 2 days additional paid leave per year for volunteering, fully paid 4 week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love.
• Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid‑working model with Flex, Office Based, and Remote options *role dependant. All offices are dog‑friendly. Ability to work abroad for 4 weeks per year in UK tax treaty countries.
• Family Life: 18 weeks of paid parental leave for full‑time regular employees, IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave.
• Learn + Grow: Budgets for conferences, learning subscriptions, and more. Mentorship and programmes to upskill employees.
• Your Future: Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary), pension matching up to 6% of qualifying earnings.
• Depop Extras: Employees enjoy free shipping on their Depop sales within the UK. Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!