Data Engineering Manager

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

Diversity 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