Lead Engineer - Data and Customer Data Platforms

The opportunity is to run the engineering function on our largest hospitality client — a household UK brand operating across 2,700+ venues — and to manage a team of six Data Engineers working across Databricks and Treasure Data. This is a senior technical leadership role. You will own the engineering roadmap across both platforms, set the bar for how we design and ship, and be the person clients trust when things get hard. You will also shape the standards, tooling and career development for one of our most critical pods. The work speaks for itself: a Single Customer View built on Treasure Data, advanced analytics and ML in Databricks, and real-time omnichannel activation through Braze. The programme consistently beats its commercial targets — YoY by an average of over 34% across the last two years. Your job is to keep it doing that, and to find the next gear.

What you'll do:

• Lead the engineering roadmap across Databricks and Treasure Data for our largest hospitality client — setting technical direction, quality bars and delivery cadence.
• Manage, coach and grow a team of six Data Engineers — unblock daily work, run 1:1s, own career development, and set standards for code review, testing and on-call.
• Shape solution design and effort scoping on new workstreams — partnering with Solution Architects, Strategic Services and Client Delivery to translate business problems into technical proposals clients can buy into.
• Act as the senior technical voice in client conversations — presenting architecture, defending trade-offs, and telling clients what needs to happen, not just what they want to hear.
• Drive DevOps and engineering excellence — CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, observability, environment management and secure, repeatable deployments across both platforms.
• Partner cross-pod with Customer Activation; Data Science exposure to mParticle, Tealium, Segment or Salesforce CDP will translate.
• Production-grade PySpark / Databricks experience — building scalable data pipelines, optimising performance, and operating Delta Lake / Lakehouse architectures in a real production environment.
• Solid DevOps craft — CI/CD pipelines, Git-based workflows, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or similar), monitoring, alerting, and calm handling of production incidents.
• Proven experience leading a data engineering team — not just senior IC work. You've managed people, set standards, and grown engineers into stronger engineers.
• A consulting mindset — comfortable client-facing, able to translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders, and confident running a workshop or defending a design in a steering committee.
• Solid solution design and effort scoping — you can take a loose business problem, shape it into an architecture, break it into deliverables, and put a credible number against it.

Nice to have:

• Experience with MarTech / CRM activation platforms — Braze, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Talon.One, Hightouch, LiveRamp.
• Background in consumer-facing sectors — hospitality, travel, retail, CPG or media.
• Cloud platform certifications — AWS preferred; Azure or GCP equally welcome.
• Familiarity with GDPR, consent management and data governance in a marketing context.
• Exposure to AI / ML use cases applied to customer data — personalisation models, churn prediction, LTV, next-best-action decisioning.

Why this role matters:

This client is one of the most meaningful engagements in our portfolio — and the work has a direct line to our 2026 company objectives around revenue growth, gross margin and employee retention. The data and MarTech infrastructure you lead will profile, model and engage millions of customers in near real-time. You will join a business that is trading profitably for the first time in its history, in a pod that is central to that story, reporting to the Head of Technology and Product with the backing of One Silverbullet — not a fragmented capability team. If you want to build the Intelligence Layer for one of the UK's most loved hospitality brands — and grow a team of engineers while you do it — we'd like to talk.

TEAM: 6 Data Engineers

REPORTS TO: Head of Technology