Senior Data Platform Engineer - Data Enablement

Depop Limited - Nova; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Depop Limited - Nova is seeking a Senior Data Platform (Enablement) Engineer to architect, build, and scale our data platform. You will empower teams with self-serve capabilities and own data transformation tooling, orchestration, and governance across Databricks, Airflow, dbt, and more.

You will collaborate with product data scientists, ML engineers, analytics engineers, and data teams to shape data-as-a-product practices while maintaining data privacy and governance.

Qualifications

• Experience with streaming ecosystems (Kafka, Flink, Confluent).
• Strong programming in Python and/ or Scala with solid engineering practices.
• Experience delivering data governance, observability, and data quality.
• Proven ability to design, build, and scale data platforms and backend infra.

Responsibilities

• Pave a path for data as product with governance tooling.
• Develop microservices, libraries, and data pipelines.
• Design and evolve platform services for data usage across teams.
• Lead initiatives with data scientists, ML engineers, and analytics engineers.
• Uphold operational excellence and incident response for data platform.

Skills

Kafka

Flink

Confluent

Python

Scala

Data governance

Observability

Data platforms

Tools

Airflow

dbt

Databricks

Terraform

Docker

Job description

Company Description

Depop is a peer‑to‑peer circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover secondhand fashion. Our mission is simple: to make fashion circular by making secondhand as exciting and rewarding as buying new. Founded in 2011, Depop’s diverse community has helped move resale into the mainstream, where buying secondhand is no longer an alternative, but how people of different ages now engage with fashion. Today, more than 56 million registered users come to Depop to find great value, express their own personal style and give clothes a longer life. We believe that everything you want already exists, and our role is to help people discover it. Powered by a team of over 500 people, our company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York. In 2021, Depop became a wholly‑owned subsidiary of Etsy - the global marketplace for unique and creative goods - and continues to operate as a standalone company. For more information, visit www.depop.com

We aim to create an inclusive environment where everyone is welcome, no matter who they are or where they’re from. Just as our platform connects people globally, we believe our workplace should reflect the diversity of the communities we serve. We thrive on the power of different perspectives and experiences, knowing they drive innovation and bring us closer to our users. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer, providing employment opportunities without regard to age, ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation, disability, pregnancy or maternity, marriage and civil partnership, or any other protected status. We’re continuously evolving our recruitment processes to ensure fairness and are open to accommodating any needs you might have.

AI Disclosure: We use AI tools (Google Gemini) to help our team source and review applications for roles with a high volume of applications. These tools assist our recruiters in identifying great talent but do not replace human decision‑making. At Depop, every hiring decision is made by a human. If, due to a disability, you need adjustments to complete the application, please let us know by sending an email with your name, the role to which you would like to apply, and the type of support you need to complete the application to [e-mail]. Data is at the heart of what we do.

Depop is looking for a Senior Data Platform (Enablement) Engineer to help architect, build, and scale our data platform, empowering teams with self‑serve capabilities. You’ll combine hands‑on technical expertise with strategic thinking to shape the foundation that supports our products and customers, enabling teams own, process, query, and manage their data with efficiency and ease. You will work closely with people from a wide variety of domains: Product Data Scientists, Analytics Engineers, ML Engineers, MLOps, MarTech and other Data Engineering teams. You will help manage our growing data needs and support increasingly complex business problems by building and promoting self‑service tools and data best practices that will be used across the organisation, including taking ownership of our data transformation and orchestration tooling; batch and streaming infrastructure and exploration tools (Databricks, Airflow, dbt) and look after our Datalake (ingestion, storage, governance, privacy). You’ll work with a modern, cutting‑edge data stack and play a key role in shaping data‑as‑a‑product practices. As we scale to meet Depop’s bold growth ambitions, you’ll help introduce the next generation of data capabilities.

Want to find out more about Depop & our engineering team? We write about technology, people and smart engineering right here - https://engineering.depop.com/

What You’ll Do

• Pave a path for data as product: Champion data as a first‑class citizen by introducing robust data observability and governance tooling into the platform
• Software engineering: Develop microservices, libraries, data pipelines
• Technical design: implement and evolve platform services that enable teams to work with data efficiently and securely, using modern tooling such as Kafka, Terraform, Docker, and cloud‑native patterns
• Lead technical initiatives: Lead initiatives working with end users: data scientists, ML engineers, analytics engineers, product engineers and beyond to enable, support and accelerate their data needs, embracing a platform as product mindset
• Uphold operational excellence: building scalable services, leading incident response and root cause analysis, and continuously improving the health and performance of our data platform.
• Champion scalable best practices through automation, clear documentation, and knowledge sharing via tutorials and training sessions
• Stakeholder collaboration: Work closely with both technical and non‑technical stakeholders to define, design, and implement solutions within our Data Platform. Trusted relationship will be key for success
• Invest in others’ growth: Mentoring and sharing knowledge, helping elevate technical standards and fostering a culture of continuous improvement
• Build on engineering culture: You take an active role in improving the engineering culture at Depop and encourage others around you to follow these values

What You’ll Bring

• Streaming knowledge: Experience with Kafka/Flink/Confluent or other streaming ecosystems, with a solid understanding of their components
• Advanced knowledge in a high‑level programming language (e.g. Python, Scala) with solid foundation in software engineering best practices - testing, clean coding standards, code reviews, pair programming, automation‑first mindset
• Experience delivering data compliance & privacy solutions, ensuring that we uphold data subject rights for our customers
• Experience introducing a data governance & observability stack enabling rich data lineage, data contracts, SLA/SLO, tagging and data quality monitoring capabilities both on our own platform but also for data owners
• Proven experience designing, building, and scaling data platforms and backend infrastructure in production environments - have worked to enable advanced data users: ML Engineers, analysts, analytics engineers and have a strong grasp of their needs and how they operate
• Big data technologies, with expertise in tools & platforms such as Airflow, dbt, Kafka, Databricks and data observability & catalogue) solutions (e.g. Monte Carlo, Atlan, Datahub)
• Cloud Platform proficiency: familiarity with AWS, GCP, or Microsoft Azure, with hands‑on experience building scalable, reliable data solutions on cloud platforms
• A passion for learning new things and keeping on top of the latest developments and technologies in our field. We take pride in our learning and make sure to have dedicated time set aside for our growth and development (we offer personal development time and other platforms to share knowledge with your peers)

Nice To Have

• Knowledge of systems design within a modern cloud‑based environment
• Advanced experience working and understanding the tradeoffs of at least one of the following Data Lake table/file formats: Delta Lake, Parquet, Iceberg, Hudi
• Experience working with lakehouse / medallion architectures in Databricks
• Experience with experimentation support tooling (such as Optimizely)
• A genuine curiosity about AI and a willingness to explore how it can enhance your day‑to‑day work

Additional Information

• Health + Mental Wellbeing PMI and cash plan healthcare access with Bupa
• Subsidised counselling and coaching with Self Space
• Cycle to Work scheme with options from Evans or the Green Commute Initiative
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for 24/7 confidential support
• Mental Health First Aiders across the business for support and signposting
• Work/Life Balance: 25 days of annual leave with the option to carry over up to 5 days
• Impact hours: Up to 2 days of additional paid leave per year for volunteering
• Fully paid 4‑week sabbatical after completion of 5 years of consecutive service with Depop, to give you a chance to recharge or do something you love.
• Flexible Working: MyMode hybrid‑working model with Flex, Office‑Based, and Remote options *role‑dependent
• All offices are dog‑friendly
• Family Life: For birth parent: 20 weeks of paid parental leave for full‑time regular employees For non‑birth parents: 12 weeks of paid parental leave for full‑time regular employees IVF leave, shared parental leave, and paid emergency parent/carer leave
• Learn + Grow: Twice‑yearly development chats and yearly performance reviews Learning budget Upskilling our employees with company‑wide training workshops, materials and resources
• Your Future: Life Insurance (financial compensation of 3x your salary) Pension matching up to 6% of full base salary with Aviva
• Depop Extras: In‑office Depop Shop (that’s free!) and a packing station with free delivery.
• Special milestones are celebrated with gifts and rewards!

Depop is a peer‑to‑peer circular fashion marketplace where anyone can buy, sell and discover secondhand fashion. Our mission is simple: to make fashion circular by making secondhand as exciting and rewarding as buying new. Founded in 2011, Depop’s diverse community has helped move resale into the mainstream, where buying secondhand is no longer an alternative, but how people of different ages now engage with fashion. Today, more than 56 million registered users come to Depop to find great value, express their own personal style and give clothes a longer life. We believe that everything you want already exists, and our role is to help people discover it. Powered by a team of over 500 people, our company is headquartered in London, with offices in New York. In 2021, Depop became a wholly‑owned subsidiary of Etsy - the global marketplace for unique and creative goods - and continues to operate as a standalone company. For more information, visit www.depop.com Want to learn more about life at Depop? We share life at Depop updates on our LinkedIn page, and you can also keep an eye on all our job opportunities on our careers page.