Hybrid Data Engineering Manager: Lead Platform & Data

Zoopla Ltd.; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 110,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Cycle to work

Free Calm App

Discretionary annual bonus up to 10%

Group Income Protection

Private medical insurance

Gym on-site

7.5% pension contribution

Enhanced parental leave

Fertility Treatment Financial Support

Job summary

Zoopla Ltd. is seeking a Data Engineering Manager to lead our data platform and drive data-driven decisions across the business. You’ll shape the lakehouse architecture, own the roadmap, and mentor a team of four engineers to deliver scalable data solutions.

You'll collaborate with platform and product leaders, own vendor relationships, and champion governance, security and responsible AI within a high-growth property tech environment.

Qualifications

• Experience leading data engineering initiatives and setting technical direction, with formal line management experience OR mentoring engineers.
• Deep experience with a modern lakehouse, ideally Databricks and Unity Catalog, and with dbt.
• Comfortable on AWS and with infrastructure as code (Terraform), and able to hold your own in a design review with platform engineers.
• Strong grounding in ingestion and integration patterns: managed connectors, change data capture, event-driven and streaming ingestion, and reverse ETL or file-based exports to external systems and customers.
• Practical data governance: access control, data contracts, data quality and personal data handling, applied so teams can move faster.
• Experience using AI tools in engineering work, with a clear view on where they help, and how to keep them safe.
• You build strong partnerships with engineering and product leaders, and you can disagree well and still land on a shared plan.
• You know what your platform costs and what the business gets back for it.

Responsibilities

• Setting the direction for Data Engineering and communicating it. We have ideas, but we want one person with the remit to own and drive it.
• Building a shared roadmap with the Head of Platform Engineering and Head of Product for Platform, so Data Engineering work is planned in from the start. Bringing a view, challenging theirs, and agreeing where data architecture and platform architecture meet.
• Putting governance in place that people and AI can follow.
• Making AI part of how the team works, and bringing Data Engineering into our software factory.
• Owning our Fivetran relationship and its cost.
• Leading, coaching and growing the team. Hiring well, giving clear feedback, and sharing knowledge so nobody is the only person who understands a piece of the platform.

Skills

Team leadership

Databricks

Unity Catalog

dbt

AWS

Terraform

Data governance

Data ingestion

AI in engineering

Stakeholder alignment

Tools

Databricks

Unity Catalog

dbt

Fivetran

AWS

Terraform

Job description

Zoopla Ltd. is seeking a Data Engineering Manager to lead our data platform and drive data-driven decisions across the business. You’ll shape the lakehouse architecture, own the roadmap, and mentor a team of four engineers to deliver scalable data solutions.

You'll collaborate with platform and product leaders, own vendor relationships, and champion governance, security and responsible AI within a high-growth property tech environment.