Job Description
15gifts is a private equity backed, Brighton-based company, we pride ourselves on fostering a culture that celebrates brilliance, encourages ownership, and champions continuous innovation.
Our products empower customers of leading global brands like Verizon, Vodafone, O2, Three and Tesco Mobile to make confident decisions online. Building on our 12 years as market leader in guided e-commerce, we’re now entering an exciting new growth stage. We’re on a mission to create a virtual sales agent that performs better than a human sales agent.
We’re looking for a Data Engineering Manager to lead a small team in building a key part of our data infrastructure - evolving and scaling the ingestion of customer product catalogues into our internal systems. This role blends people management, individual contribution, and technology leadership.
People Management: You will lead and mentor a small team of Data Engineers, fostering a high-performance culture by guiding their professional growth and ensuring effective communication within the team and with stakeholders. Your strong interpersonal skills will enable you to bring out the best in your team members.
Individual Contribution: As a confident individual contributor, you will take ownership of project briefs, effectively elicit requirements, and design robust architectural plans. You will also champion the importance of thorough testing and ensure alignment with stakeholder expectations throughout the development process.
Technology Leadership: You will guide strategic decision-making regarding technology and architecture, ensuring solutions are scalable, cost-effective, and flexible enough to meet diverse customer needs. This involves a strong understanding of engineering trade-offs, collaborative design, and proactive roadmap planning, with an openness to exploring innovative solutions like generative AI where appropriate.
We work with an Airflow / AWS / Fivetran / Snowflake / Looker stack and typically use Python and Docker in our pipelines. You’ll need to be highly proficient in these or similar tools and comfortable navigating a modern data ecosystem.
The person we’re looking for
Passionate about designing and delivering solutions to complex problems
Curious with a desire for continuous learning
Friendly, with a collaborative and pragmatic approach to problem-solving
Excellent communicator across technical and non-technical audiences
Self-motivated and self-managing, with great organisational skills
Comfortable expressing your views and listening to others, as the situation requires
Experienced and passionate about ELT projects, data modelling, and big data
Excited to lead and develop our data engineering talent
You’ll be responsible for
Managing, mentoring, and supporting a team of data engineers
Serving as a subject matter expert
Gathering use cases and requirements from stakeholders across the business
Translating use cases, pain points and success criteria into technical requirements
Collaboratively developing and agreeing on architecture plans and data flows
Building and maintaining high-quality data pipelines and self-service tools
Writing robust, automated tests to ensure data integrity and quality
Promoting data governance through documentation, observability and controls
Troubleshooting, resolving issues, maintaining operational stability and responding to incidents
Championing tools, standards, and best practices within the team
Skills and experience
Proven experience managing and mentoring data engineering teams
Strong commercial experience in a senior data engineering role
Comfortable owning and delivering technical projects end-to-end
Deep understanding of the full data lifecycle and ELT patterns
Comfortable evaluating both business and technical requirements
Skilled at working with large datasets and optimising data flows
Experience with Airflow, AWS, Fivetran, Snowflake, Docker (or similar)
Strong in Python, SQL, and cloud platforms (AWS or comparable)
Experienced in handling real-time data pipelines
Experienced in evolving data pipelines over time to meet new business requirements
is incredibly important to us. Research shows how people from marginalised groups are less likely to apply for a job unless they meet every requirement. However, these accountabilities are a guide, and, if you feel like this role could be for you and you don’t meet every criteria, please do apply. We’d love to hear from you.
Benefits include
Medicash healthcare scheme (reclaim costs for dental, physiotherapy, osteopathy and optical care)
Life Insurance scheme
25 days holiday + bank holidays + your birthday off (rising to 28 after 3 consecutive years with the business & 30 after 5 years)
Employee Assistance Programme (confidential counselling)
Enhanced parental leave and pay
Referral programme
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