Data Engineering Manager in Manchester

We’re looking for someone who enjoys both technical leadership and people development. You’ll be comfortable working across engineering detail, platform direction and stakeholder conversations.

Requirements:

• Building, operating or leading cloud-based data platforms and production-grade data workflows.
• Working with data pipelines, data modelling, orchestration and modern cloud data tools such as Databricks, BigQuery, Spark or similar.
• Event-driven or streaming data patterns, as well as more traditional operational, legacy or non-event-driven data environments.
• Designing reliable, observable and well-tested data products that can be trusted by both technical and non-technical users.
• Coaching, mentoring or supporting engineers, with an interest in helping people develop and progress.
• Communicating technical ideas clearly and making pragmatic decisions in fast-moving environments.

(Desirable)

• Experience with lakehouse architecture, medallion-style workflows or enterprise data modelling.
• Exposure to data governance, catalogue tooling, lineage, data quality frameworks or access management.
• Experience using AI tools to support engineering productivity, automation or data quality.
• Experience helping teams move from batch-heavy or legacy patterns towards more real-time, event-driven or cloud-native approaches.

What the job involves:

We’re looking for a Data Engineering Manager to help lead and grow our data engineering capability, shaping the platforms and practices that power analytics, insight and AI-driven innovation across the business. This is a great opportunity for someone who enjoys developing people as much as solving complex technical and platform challenges.

You’ll play a key role in helping us modernise how data moves through the business, from event-driven cloud data through to more traditional operational data sources, while supporting a talented team of engineers to do their best work.

As Data Engineering Manager, you’ll help lead a team responsible for building reliable, scalable and trusted data products across On the Beach. The role will be varied, with your time broadly split across three key areas:

• Helping us consume and shape event-driven data.
• Working with more traditional data sources and patterns.
• Supporting the growth and development of the team.

You’ll work closely with engineers, analysts, product teams, commercial teams and senior stakeholders to make sure our data platforms are robust, well understood and genuinely useful to the business.

Leading, supporting and developing a team of data engineers, creating an environment where people can grow, share knowledge and deliver high-quality work.

Shaping our approach to both modern event-driven data and more traditional data sources, helping improve how we ingest, process, model and make data available across the business.

Supporting the design and evolution of our data platform, including pipelines, orchestration, observability, lineage, governance and data quality.

Partnering with teams across Product, Engineering, Analytics and Data to understand business needs and translate them into scalable, maintainable data solutions.

Helping define and improve data engineering standards around testing, monitoring, documentation, deployment and reliability.

Making pragmatic technical decisions that balance delivery, platform quality, long-term maintainability and business value.

Encouraging a culture of technical curiosity, continuous improvement and strong engineering practice across the team.

What success looks like:

Success in this role is about building data pipelines and products that teams can trust. You’ll help improve the reliability, quality and performance of our data platform, making it easier for teams across On the Beach to access and use the data they need. You’ll reduce friction for downstream analytics and AI use cases by creating well-structured, well-tested and well-documented data products. You’ll also contribute to a strong engineering culture within the data team, where standards are clear, pipelines are observable, and continuous improvement is part of how we work.

Our full time hours are 37.5 per week, but we don't have rigid working hours so you can find the working pattern that's right for you. We have core working hours between 10am - 4pm, so we can collaborate and enjoy the social side of work.