Lead Data Engineer

ITV plc; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

ITV plc in London’s White City is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to act as a technical orchestrator across a real-time data ecosystem. You’ll bridge high-level requirement analysis, distributed systems design, and hands-on delivery in a hybrid setup.

You will balance data and infrastructure architecture, guide the engineering squad, and own the delivery flow from design through to production, with a focus on operational excellence and scalable, cloud-native solutions.

Qualifications

• Proven leadership of technical system designs in high-scale cloud-native environments.
• Hands-on engineer with experience in real-time data ingestion and processing pipelines.
• Ability to mentor engineers and drive DevOps culture.

Responsibilities

• Translate business roadmaps into high-level designs for event-driven streaming solutions.
• Architect high-throughput data ingestion and align with cloud infrastructure.
• Lead the engineering squad, perform code reviews, and enforce best practices.
• Refine requirements into technical tasks with a lean backlog.
• Ensure operational excellence and define monitoring strategies (Grafana/Prometheus).
• Participate in weekly support rotation as escalation point.

Skills

Python

Go

Distributed systems

Cloud architecture

Data pipelines

Mentorship

DevOps culture

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Job description

Workplace: White City, London - Hybrid 1-2 days a week on site

Contract Type: Permanent

The Role

As a Lead Data Engineer, you operate as a technical orchestrator and a guardian of excellence across our real-time operational data ecosystem. You are positioned at the critical intersection of high-level requirement analysis, distributed systems design, and hands-on delivery.

You will balance deep data architecture with infrastructure architecture, bridging the gap between data pipelines and cloud-native container platforms.

Your time will be balanced across three core pillars:

• 40% High-Level Design & Architecture: Reviewing incoming business requirements, driving technical discussions, and mapping out scalable, distributed data architectures.
• 40% Hands-On Engineering: Writing clean, testable code alongside the team, implementing core platform features, building reusable components and undertaking support requests.
• 20% Mentorship & Technical Governance: Cultivating the engineering squad's capabilities, managing technical debt, and defining quality frameworks.

Key Responsibilities

• Technical Orchestration: Translate complex business roadmaps into high-level designs, defining the structures, components, and interactions of event-driven streaming solutions.
• Data & Infrastructure Architecture: Architect high-throughput, real-time data ingestion pipelines while partnering with DevOps specialists to ensure alignment with cloud infrastructure frameworks.
• People Leadership & Mentoring: Oversee the technical growth and motivation of the engineering squad, running code reviews, sharing knowledge, and embedding engineering best practices.
• Delivery Flow: Partner with the Engineering Manager and Product Managers to refine requirements into technical tasks, ensuring iterative delivery and a lean backlog.
• Operational Excellence & SLA Management: Guard platform reliability against extreme traffic loads, establishing a proactive monitoring strategy via Grafana/Prometheus.
• Escalation & Support: Participate in the team's weekly support rotation as a high-level escalation point, leading Root Cause Analysis when critical operational challenges arise.

What You’ll Bring

• Polyglot Engineering Literacy: Strong backend development capability with a willingness to design, challenge, and review logic across Python and Go, with Java or Scala as valuable secondaries.
• Cloud Native Expertise: Extensive experience with the GCP Stack (GKE, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Dataflow, Cloud Functions) and event-driven architectures.
• Infrastructure as Code: Deep understanding of automated infrastructure deployment using Terraform and container orchestration via Kubernetes.
• Systems Thinking: Ability to map out complex, multi-project data flows and microservices environments, ensuring modularity and resilience.
• Strategic Communication: Ability to articulate abstract technical designs clearly to both technical engineers and non-technical stakeholders.
• Nice to Have: Familiarity with ESG and/or Sustainable Software Engineering principles to optimise cloud compute efficiency, or experience shifting data capabilities to "Edge" environments.

Minimum Criteria

• Demonstrable experience leading technical system designs and defining architecture in a high-scale, cloud-native operational data environment.
• Proven hands-on engineering experience handling high-throughput, real-time data ingestion and processing pipelines.
• Experience mentoring engineers, managing technical debt, and steering code-first DevOps cultures.