Senior Data Engineer in Liverpool

Data moves fast, and the businesses that win are the ones whose data can keep up with their ambition.

That is the problem this role exists to solve, and it is a genuinely interesting one.

As our Senior Data Engineer at Protein Works, you will be the person who owns the pipelines, the warehouse, and the data infrastructure that the rest of the business quietly depends on every single day.

Not for the sake of a tidy architecture diagram, and not to build something impressive that nobody queries.

For leverage: making decision‑making across marketing, trading, operations and finance faster, more trustworthy, and more commercially effective by building infrastructure the business actually relies on.

About Protein Works

Founded in 2012 on a clear conviction: the sports nutrition industry had become complacent, and there was a better way to do it.

Over a decade later, we are a £50m business with five consecutive years of double‑digit growth, a brand new £10m campus in Liverpool, and ambitions that go well beyond where we are today.

We are growing, investing and hiring with purpose.

If you want to join a business with the energy of a challenger and the foundations of a market leader, this is the right moment to do it.

• What you will be doing
• Owning BI infrastructure end‑to‑end, from initial brief and requirement gathering through to data pipeline development across APIs, ETL, ELT and SQL.
• Working alongside Data Analyst colleagues to help them generate impactful business insights and analysis.
• Taking day‑to‑day responsibility for the quality, security and performance of our Data Lake and Warehouse.
• Building and maintaining robust CI/CD processes for data pipelines using tools such as Cloud Build and Git Hub, raising the standard of how code is tested, deployed and version‑controlled.
• Proactively monitoring pipeline health, optimising performance, and managing infrastructure costs to ensure efficient scaling.
• Applying strong data modelling, semantic consistency and metadata discipline so data is discoverable and usable by both humans and AI tools.
• Partnering with function‑specific AI engineers and analysts to understand their data needs and unblock them quickly.
• Using AI tooling to accelerate your own engineering, from code generation to pipeline documentation to data quality checks.
• Championing knowledge sharing and best practice across the team and wider business.
• What success looks like
• Demonstrable data engineering experience with a data warehouse platform, with pipelines and infrastructure you can point to.
• Extremely strong SQL skills, non‑negotiable.
• Significant hands‑on experience integrating APIs into real, production data flows.
• Experience with the Google Cloud Platform data stack, including Big Query, Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, IAM Management, and Data Studio.
• Strong working knowledge of Python for pipeline development, automation, and tooling integration.
• Hands‑on experience with Cloud Build and Git Hub for version control and CI/CD.
• A working understanding of how to keep data AI‑ready: strong modelling, semantic consistency, and metadata discipline that both humans and AI tools can rely on.
• Comfortable working across the full data landscape that a growing DTC business touches: marketing, trading, operations and finance.
• Able to take a messy brief and turn it into a structured, working pipeline without needing it handed to you step by step.
• A high personal standard for detail and communication, because the data you ship becomes the truth other teams build decisions on.
• A degree is not required for this role. What matters is what you have built, what you can show, and how you think about problems.
• Nice to have
• Hands‑on experience with dbt, Dataform or equivalent transformation and orchestration frameworks; familiarity with Terraform or equivalent infrastructure‑as‑code tooling; comfort with vector databases, embeddings, or semantic search; and working knowledge of Google's marketing stack, including Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Ads and Google Search Console.

You are the kind of person who designs for systems running reliably without you, not for you firefighting them.

You ask whether a pipeline will hold up at scale before you ship it.

You are commercially grounded enough to connect every piece of infrastructure back to s.

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