Data Engineering Lead

Overview

The Enterprise Data Platforms and Services (EDPS) team are a central technology group responsible for building, administering, governing, and setting global standards for a growing number of Elsevier strategic data platforms and services. The capabilities enable data to be collected, accessed, processed and integrated across a wide range of digital business solutions, used by functions including billing and order management, customer and product master data management, and business analytics and insights delivery. The team is relied upon to ensure systems are trusted, reliable and available. The technology underpinning these capabilities includes Snowflake, Tableau, DBT, Talend, Collibra, Kafka/Confluent, Astronomer/Airflow, and Kubernetes. This forms part of a longer-term strategic direction to implement Data Mesh and establish shared platforms that enable a connected collection of enterprise-ready time-saving services with a self-service first approach. Our mission is to enable frictionless experiences for all Elsevier colleagues, so that they can openly and securely consume and produce trustworthy data, enhancing everyday colleague and customer interactions and decisions.

The Role

As the Software Engineering Lead, you will be responsible for nurturing a high performing cross-functional squad of software and data engineers. This squad is responsible for a growing number of strategic capabilities and components that serve a large number of engineering, data science, and analytics use cases and stakeholders. You will be expected to be the technical subject matter expert overseeing the squad building an Enterprise Data Platform that supports both operational and analytical use cases.

In practice, this will mean combining your technical expertise with strong stakeholder engagement to build a deep understanding of business needs when designing a technical solution that is fit-for-purpose. To be successful, you need to understand user requirements and map diverse user interactions with the various platform components to inform your implementation decisions. You will collaborate closely with other technology teams to ensure we drive a culture of contributing towards shared services.

Your success will be primarily measured by demonstrable increases in the number of teams adopting and contributing to the platform capabilities and shared repositories we provision, and clear improvements in technical efficiency/value gains.

Key Responsibilities and Accountabilities

• Accountable for team performance – manage a high performing agile delivery squad, ensuring you nurture team skills, trust, and relationships through coaching and mentoring.
• Accountable for releases – set technical development and coding standards that make up a robust and mature SDLC, and review team releases to guarantee these are met.
• Accountable for shared services – build common frameworks and patterns that can be easily reused, contributed to, and reliably deployed by other teams via self-service.
• Accountable for best practices – establish component specific guidelines in collaboration with your team, wider engineering teams, architecture, end-users, data product owners, and enablement teams, to promote these through regular knowledge sharing sessions.
• Accountable for operational efficiency – drive improvements in efficiency, reliability, and scalability supported by logging, monitoring and observability as a foundational capability.
• Responsible for adoption – promote the platform capabilities through technical communities of practice leadership, high internal standards for documented processes and internal guides, and take steps to capture and action user feedback.
• Responsible for platform evolution – collaborate with key stakeholder groups to analyse and identify capability gaps, and drive discussions required to make a case for change.
• Responsible for technical governance – establish and manage the technical design authority process for each capability to successfully govern self-service use of the platform.

Essential Skills & Experience

• Team leadership – driven line manager and technical lead, deeply interested in coaching and mentoring, to motivate cross-functional squads to deliver complex technical initiatives.
• Software development lifecycle (SDLC) – applied understanding of SDLC best practices, having delivered improvements in previous teams\\\’ SDLC and DataOps/DevOps maturity.
• Agile delivery – facilitating ceremonies, removing impediments, coordinating requirements refinement to ensure tasks are achievable, and driving a culture of iterative improvement.
• Modern data stack – hands-on deployment and governance of enterprise technologies at scale (e.g., Snowflake, Tableau, DBT, Fivetran, Airflow, AWS, GitHub, Terraform) for self-service workloads.
• Coding languages – deployable and reusable Python, JavaScript, and Jinja templating languages for ETL/ELT data applications, data pipelines, and stored procedures.
• Thought leadership and influencing – deep interest in data platforms landscape to build well-articulated proposals supported by research, value delivery, and success in driving and adopting change.
• Solution design and architecture – capable of creating comprehensive technical design documents, including architecture and infrastructure artifacts, to support scalable, secure, and efficient data platforms with reliable data flow from ingestion to consumption.
• AWS cloud ecosystem – deep knowledge of AWS data and analytics services and the infrastructure required for production-grade data solutions and applications.
• Prioritisation – adaptable to changing needs with a professional, flexible and pragmatic response to evolving priorities while mitigating impacts.

About the Business

A global leader in information and analytics, we help researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society. Building on our publishing heritage, we combine quality information and vast data sets with analytics to support science and research, health education and interactive learning, as well as exceptional healthcare and clinical practice. At Elsevier, your work contributes to the world\\\’s grand challenges and a more sustainable future. We harness innovative technologies to support science and healthcare to partner for a better world. RELX is a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers, enabling them to make better decisions and be more productive.

Work and Benefits

Our purpose is to benefit society by developing products that help researchers advance scientific knowledge; doctors and nurses improve the lives of patients; lawyers promote the rule of law and achieve justice; businesses and governments prevent fraud; consumers access financial services and get fair prices on insurance; and customers learn about markets and complete transactions. We offer flexible work arrangements, wellbeing initiatives, study assistance, and sabbaticals. We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to an inclusive, agile, collaborative and innovative environment.

Equal Opportunity and Accommodation

We are committed to providing a fair and accessible hiring process. If you have a disability or other need that requires accommodation or adjustment, please let us know by completing our Applicant Request Support Form or contacting 1-855-833-5120.