Senior Data Engineer — AI‑Driven Data Platform Lead

Zoopla; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working

Two remote days per week

Gym on-site in London

Pension 7.5% by company

Group Income Protection

Job summary

Zoopla is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to build the next stage of its data platform in a hybrid UK setup. You’ll own end-to-end data engineering projects, design standard ingestion/export patterns, and ensure governance, cost, and security across pipelines.

You’ll collaborate with platform engineers, analytics teams, and data science, leveraging Databricks, Unity Catalog, and dbt. Strong Python/SQL and AWS IaC experience are essential.

Qualifications

• Production data pipelines experience across teams and customers.
• Strong Python and SQL proficiency.
• Deep experience with a modern lakehouse, ideally Databricks and Unity Catalog, and with dbt.
• Comfortable on AWS and with infrastructure as code (Terraform).
• Strong grounding in ingestion and integration patterns: managed connectors, CDC, event-driven and streaming ingestion, and exports to external systems.
• Track record of simplifying: replacing one-off pipelines with a small number of patterns.
• Experience using AI tools in engineering work with safety and governance in mind.
• Practical data governance: access control, data quality and personal data handling.
• Ability to explain technical concepts in plain English.

Responsibilities

• Owning Data Engineering projects end to end, from technical direction to business impact.
• Designing and building our standard ingestion and export patterns, and migrating existing pipelines onto them.
• Building governance into every pipeline: access, personal data, lineage and cost.
• Using AI to make patterns faster to apply and bring Data Engineering into our software factory.
• Reviewing code, mentoring other engineers, and sharing knowledge.
• Maintaining production health and reliability.

Skills

Data pipelines

Python

SQL

Databricks

Unity Catalog

dbt

AWS

Terraform

Data governance

Plain English communication

Tools

Terraform

dbt

AWS

Databricks

Job description

Zoopla is seeking a Senior Data Engineer to build the next stage of its data platform in a hybrid UK setup. You’ll own end-to-end data engineering projects, design standard ingestion/export patterns, and ensure governance, cost, and security across pipelines.

You’ll collaborate with platform engineers, analytics teams, and data science, leveraging Databricks, Unity Catalog, and dbt. Strong Python/SQL and AWS IaC experience are essential.