Data Practice Lead

We’re looking for a Development Practice Lead who can move seamlessly between architecture discussions, hands-on technical guidance, and coaching senior engineers.

Department: Architecture & Engineering

Location: Remote

What you’ll do:

• Lead the Development Practice on matters of Data, BI, and Enterprise Systems; driving ambition and suggesting logic-backed additions to roadmaps.
• Coach and mentor four tech leads while staying hands-on with architecture reviews and design decisions.
• Define and enforce technical standards across our data stack: Snowflake, Airflow, AWS, Business Objects, and Oracle.
• Collaborate with solution architects to evolve River Island’s enterprise data and integration strategy.
• Review solution proposals and spot anti-patterns in data flow, orchestration, and schema design.
• Shape best practice around observability (OpenTelemetry), metadata management, and data mesh principles.

Tech landscape you’ll be dealing with:

• Databases: Snowflake (micro-partitioning, clustering, schema design, cost optimisation); Oracle E-Business Suite, ODBMS and SQL optimisation.
• Visualisation tools: BusinessObjects and semantic-layer modelling, PowerBI.
• Airflow: DAG orchestration, retries/backfills, sensors vs operators.
• AWS: cross-account IAM, VPC design, ECS/Lambda trade-offs.
• Python, SQL, Terraform, and event-driven microservices.
• AI-related integration (vector DBs, embeddings pipelines, OpenTelemetry).

What good looks like:

• Led a data engineering or BI function and still enjoy getting your hands dirty in SQL or Python.
• Successfully – or not – put PoCs together to promote an idea.
• Designed or reviewed architecture diagrams for distributed data systems.
• Coached technical leads or principal engineers in delivery and design quality.
• Balanced pragmatic delivery with clean architecture and performance-minded decisions.
• You’re opinionated but curious, architecture-literate, and allergic to buzzword managers.

What we’re not looking for:

• Project or delivery managers with no hands-on technical depth.
• “Heads of BI” who haven’t authored a query in 10 years.
• People who can’t explain why clustering keys matter in Snowflake or how Airflow handles retries.

Why join us:

RI Tech is in the middle of modernising. We’ve built data vaults, now we’re simplifying, decoupling, and rebuilding around data-driven decision-making and composable architecture. You’ll help shape how we integrate data, analytics, and AI across the business - from Oracle to AWS to Snowflake.

About Us:

We’re a much-loved brand with an exciting future. Our Islanders are a diverse bunch of bright, talented people who love working together – and are proud of the work they do. Progression here can take you in all kinds of directions. This is what a career at River Island is like. And this is where yours starts. This role is based at our Head Office in West London.

What we can offer you:

• Generous 50% staff discount and a staff shop on site.
• Discounts, financial advice, wellbeing solutions and more through the Retail Trust.
• Free onsite gym, subsidised restaurant & café, and various social events.
• Enhanced family support including maternity, paternity, adoption & fertility treatment; involvement with Retail Trust.
• Flexible working is a given, on top of payday and summer early finish Fridays.
• Give as you earn scheme with matched funding.
• Support with upskilling through on-the-job training and a succession plan.
• Generous bonus scheme & private pension plan.
• Healthcare option through AXA.
• 25 days paid holiday, with option to purchase additional days.

Keeping You Safe:

At River Island we are committed to the safeguarding of all of our employees regardless of age or job role. We will fulfil our obligation under the Prevent duty which seeks to stop extremism and extremist views from materialising in our business. We promote and encourage the belief in British Values – including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. Our Island is made up of a diverse community, where we all belong and feel part of something bigger. We are committed to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We will consider flexible working requests for all roles unless operational requirements prevent otherwise.