Job Description
About Reward
Founded in 2001, Reward is an industry leader transforming the world of customer engagement and commerce media. Operating in 15 countries across Europe, Middle East and Asia, Reward’s cloud-based API platform integrates content, advertising, and commerce to deliver exceptional experiences for consumers resulting in increased customer engagement, retention, and overall satisfaction.
Reward’s Loyalty-tech platform is behind many award-winning bank loyalty programmes seen today from brands such as Visa, NatWest Group, Barclays, and First Abu Dhabi Bank to name a few. Reward also works with the world’s largest retailers such as McDonald’s, eBay, Deliveroo and Amazon.
Their leading commerce media platform fuses purchase insights with loyalty-tech, offering an unparalleled edge in digital advertising and performance marketing for retailers. Leveraging rich data and insights, the Reward platform provides a comprehensive view of consumer behaviour, empowering retailers to target marketing messages more effectively, resulting in independently verified sales uplift and long-term customer lifetime value.
Beyond bridging the gap between content and commerce, Reward is a purpose driven business. Their mission is to make everyday spending more rewarding. During the last 5 years, Reward has proudly given back more than $1billion in cashback rewards to consumers world-wide.
Most recently, Reward’s rapid growth was recognised in The Independent’s E2ETech100 list of fastest growing tech scale-ups in the UK. Reward, in conjunction with partners NatWest Group, was also awarded the Industry Achievement Award 2023 at the prestigious Card and Payments Awards.
Role Summary
We are seeking an exceptional Principal Data Engineer with deep technical expertise and strong leadership capabilities to design, build, and scale enterprise-grade data solutions. This is a senior, hands on position requiring 10+ years of experience across cloud platforms, data engineering, and modern data frameworks.
You will serve as the organisation’s technical authority and thought leader for all data engineering practices, driving architectural decisions and ensuring our data ecosystem is robust, secure, compliant, and built for scale.
This role will shape our long-term data strategy, lead critical initiatives around data governance and data quality, and mentor engineering teams while delivering best in class data solutions on AWS.
Job Requirements
* 10+ years’ experience in data engineering, cloud technologies, and large scale data systems.
* Proven expertise in AWS (EC2, Glue, Lambda, S3, Redshift, Athena, Jupyter Notebooks).
* Advanced proficiency in Python for data processing, automation, and backend development.
* Strong hands on experience with modern data frameworks, such as:
1. Spark
2. Airflow
3. dbt
* Experience delivering data governance, lineage, metadata management, and data quality frameworks.
* Strong working knowledge of MSSQL and other RDBMS environments.
* Proficiency with Terraform for cloud provisioning and automation.
* Deep understanding of relational database concepts, query optimisation, and data modelling.
Job Responsibilities
Technical Leadership & Architecture
* Serve as the technical expert and organisational thought leader for data engineering.
* Architect end to end data frameworks for ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and storage at scale.
* Lead the design and implementation of data warehouses, data lakes, streaming pipelines, and enterprise data platforms on AWS.
* Oversee data migration strategies and execution for complex enterprise systems.
Data Governance & Quality
* Establish and enforce comprehensive data governance policies, including:
1. Data lineage
2. Metadata management
3. Data quality standards
4. Data security and compliance
* Ensure all solutions follow best practices in reliability, auditability, and documentation.
Delivery & Collaboration
* Partner closely with Data Scientists, Analysts, and cross functional stakeholders to deliver clean, reliable, well documented data pipelines.
* Produce clear, detailed technical documentation, architecture diagrams, and process guidelines.
Team Leadership & Mentoring
* Mentor and guide engineers on best practices across coding, testing, deployment, and optimisation.
* Champion continuous improvement in engineering standards and development processes.
Cloud Infrastructure & Automation
* Build and automate cloud environments using Terraform and infrastructure as code principles.
* Drive operational excellence through automation, monitoring, and optimisation.
Job Benefits
* Annual Leave: 25 days + bank holidays
* Ability to buy and sell holiday days as well as the ability to bank days (tenure dependant)
* Flexible working options: we are operating a hybrid working model with 3 days a week from the office
* Pension: Hargreaves Lansdown – up to 6% matched contribution
* Employee share scheme
* Generous family friendly cover
* Private healthcare - Bupa
* Income protection
* Critical illness cover
* Life insurance cover
* Dental cover
* Optical cover
* Yulife app for access to employee wellbeing and discounts
* Perks at Work, cashback/discount shopping site
* Employee referral scheme
* Salary sacrifice program which includes cycle to work scheme, electric car scheme and season ticket loans
* Volunteering program
* Company events i.e. Christmas party, all-company event and other social/hosted events during the year (we have an active social committee!)
* Team socials