Staff Data Engineer
At a Glance
- Staff-level data engineering role building large-scale, distributed data systems and pipelines
- Belfast, hybrid working
- Circa £80,000 to £90,000, dependent on experience
- Modern data stack: Airflow/Dagster, Spark, dbt, Kafka, AWS
About the Company
Our client is a well-established, global technology business operating in the consumer insights and e-commerce space, helping thousands of brands and retailers understand and connect with their customers through real-time data and user-generated content. Founded in the mid-2000s, the company has grown into an international operation with offices across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, and has been recognised as a Great Place to Work across multiple regions. It's a business where data engineering sits at the heart of the product, not on the periphery.
The Role
You'll join a growing Insights engineering function within a global consumer-data and e-commerce technology business, taking a lead role in designing and building the data infrastructure that powers real-time consumer feedback and analytics for major retail and brand clients. You'll work with a high degree of autonomy across the full data lifecycle, from ingestion through to storage, transformation and delivery, partnering closely with data scientists, analytics engineers and product teams. This is a senior, hands-on role for someone who wants to shape data architecture decisions rather than simply execute against them, and who thrives in a business where data quality and scale genuinely matter to the product.
Key Responsibilities
- Design and build large-scale, distributed data pipelines and systems that underpin core products and services
- Own the reliability, scalability and performance of critical data infrastructure
- Lead the technical direction for data orchestration, storage and processing architecture
- Drive adoption of strong software engineering practices across the data function, including testing, CI/CD and version control
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate data requirements into robust, production-grade solutions
- Optimise data storage and retrieval processes for scale and cost efficiency
- Mentor engineers and champion best practice across the wider data engineering team
- Troubleshoot and resolve complex data infrastructure issues as they arise
- Stay ahead of emerging data engineering technologies and bring relevant innovation into the business
What You'll Need
Essential:
- 7+ years' experience designing and building robust, scalable, distributed data systems and pipelines
- Strong experience with data orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow or Dagster
- Experience with big data storage and processing technologies such as dbt, Spark, SQL, Athena/Trino, Redshift, Snowflake, PostgreSQL or MySQL
- Knowledge of event-driven architectures and streaming technologies such as Apache Kafka, Kafka Streams or Apache Flink
- Experience with public cloud environments such as AWS, GCP, Azure or Terraform
- Strong grounding in software engineering practices: testing, CI/CD (Jenkins, GitHub Actions), agile development, version control and containers
- BSc in Computer Science or a related discipline
Desirable / Nice to Have:
- Prior experience operating at a technical leadership or staff level within a data engineering function
- Exposure to consumer or product analytics platforms at scale
Why Apply?
- Circa £80,000 to £90,000, dependent on experience
- Hybrid working from Belfast
- Genuine autonomy to shape data architecture decisions, not just implement them
- Work on systems that operate at real scale, supporting a global product
- Strong benefits package including health and pension provision
- A business recognised as a Great Place to Work across multiple regions
- Clear path to grow your technical leadership within the data function
Next Steps
If this sounds like your next move, get in touch with Eve Geddis directly on LinkedIn or via to find out more and apply.
