Lead Data Engineer - Audience Measurement
Ipsos is recruiting a Lead Data Engineer to help drive the technical evolution of our Audience Measurement data platforms. Joining a wider group of engineering leaders, you will act as a technical anchor for your team championing an architecture rooted in managed cloud services, cost‑conscious design, and incremental improvement. You will work closely with Product Managers to define requirements and our Production team to ensure operational stability, delivering scalable and modern data solutions.
What is in it for you?
This is a fantastic opportunity to work on technologies chosen intentionally, favoring proven tools that reduce cognitive load and maximize team velocity. Our core ecosystem revolves around:
* Modern Python for backend services and data processing.
* Cloud‑native serverless compute and managed workflow orchestrators. We operate across both AWS and GCP. Deep expertise in either is welcome, with opportunities to cross‑train on the other.
* Serverless NoSQL, Object Storage, and Serverless Analytics for our data layers.
* Event buses and messaging queues for asynchronous, decoupled processing.
* Infrastructure as Code (Pulumi/Terraform) and containerized deployments.
The role
As a Lead Data Engineer, you will guide the platform’s evolution toward serverless, event‑driven patterns, moving away from container‑orchestrated workflows toward managed cloud services.
Your Key Responsibilities Will Include
* Vision and strategy: champion the architectural vision within your domain, translating business needs into a practical, cost‑conscious strategy and effectively communicating it to all stakeholders.
* Technical leadership & line management: act as a lead technical authority for data engineering, including line‑management responsibilities for a small team of engineers. Guide the team on best practices, decoupled logic, and incremental modernization.
* Platform operations: oversee the operational health of your team’s data pipelines and systems, working closely with our Production team to ensure systems are highly observable, well‑documented, and easy to operate via Infrastructure as Code and containerization.
* Hands‑on engineering: personally implement core architecture, manage cloud project costs, and ensure systems are resilient.
* Data science & analytics enablement: partner with data scientists on model productionisation, establishing clear data contracts and shared standards that enable effective collaboration.
* Agile delivery: champion agile methodologies, collaborating closely with Product Managers to ensure clear requirements and drive the continual, iterative delivery of new capabilities.
* Stakeholder and client relations: act as a key technical advisor for clients and internal teams, explaining complex architectural trade‑offs to non‑technical audiences and ensuring the platform meets strategic objectives.
* Continuous improvement: foster a culture of incremental improvement, advocating for safe upgrades using parity testing, avoiding risky rewrites, and ensuring long‑term maintainability of the codebase.
About You
To be successful in this role, your technical skills should be matched by a pragmatic, cost‑first approach to problem‑solving.
Essential Criteria
* Extensive data engineering experience: a proven track record of designing, building, and maintaining scalable data platforms using modern cloud providers (AWS or GCP).
* Serverless & event‑driven expertise: experience with, or strong interest in, decomposing workloads into independent steps orchestrated by managed workflow services and triggered by data events.
* Strong programming skills: expert‑level proficiency in Python, focusing on building decoupled, testable functions and clear data contracts.
* Migration & testing experience: experience with safely modernizing legacy systems using parity testing and incremental routing patterns.
* IaC & containerization: hands‑on experience packaging runtimes into portable containers and provisioning cloud resources using modern Infrastructure as Code tools.
* Leadership & mentorship: previous line‑management experience or readiness to step into people leadership, guiding a team of engineers, conducting rigorous code reviews, and authoring clear architecture decisions.
* Cost‑conscious mindset: strong understanding of cloud economics, designing architectures that scale sustainably.
Benefits
We offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support you as an individual. Our standard benefits include 25 days annual leave, pension contribution, income protection, and life assurance. In addition, there are a range of health & wellbeing, financial benefits and professional development opportunities. We recognise that this is important for our business success – a more diverse workforce will enable us to better reflect and understand the world we research and ultimately deliver better research and insight to our clients.
We are committed to equality, treating people fairly, promoting a positive and inclusive working environment and ensuring we have diversity of people and views. We are proud to be a member of the Disability Confident scheme, certified as Level 1 Disability Confident, and we are dedicated to providing an inclusive and accessible recruitment process.
We realise you may have commitments outside of work and will consider flexible working applications – please highlight what you are looking for when you make your application. We have a hybrid approach to work and ask people to be in the office or with clients for 3 days per week.
About Us
Ipsos is one of the world’s largest research companies and currently the only one primarily managed by researchers, ranking as a #1 full‑service research organisation for four consecutive years. With over 75 different data‑driven solutions, and a presence in 90 markets, Ipsos brings together research, implementation, methodological, and subject‑matter experts from around the world, combining thematic and technical experts to deliver top‑quality research and insights. We help the biggest companies solve some of their biggest problems, serving more than 5000 clients across the globe by providing research, data, and insights on their target markets. We are proud of our continuous efforts in making Ipsos the best place to work!
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