Senior Data Engineer

We are looking for an experienced Senior Data Engineer with a strong retail background to join a leading UK retail organisation, working within a data and AI-focused team to design and implement customer data solutions that enable more personalised customer experiences. You will play a key role in building scalable, secure and reliable data solutions, ensuring customer information is accessible, accurate and used responsibly across multiple customer touchpoints. This is a highly collaborative role, working closely with engineering, MarTech, digital, product, compliance and governance teams to deliver enterprise-grade customer data capabilities., Lead technical and engineering decisions relating to customer data, including data infrastructure, APIs and data pipelines.

• Design and deliver Customer 360 and customer identity solutions, ensuring seamless integration across customer-facing platforms.
• Architect and implement real-time data integrations using event-driven architectures to support personalised customer experiences at scale.
• Design and implement consent and preference management solutions, ensuring customer data is handled in line with GDPR and relevant privacy regulations.
• Work closely with MarTech and Digital teams to ensure efficient data flows between backend systems, marketing platforms and customer engagement solutions.
• Maintain comprehensive data lineage, documentation and data dictionaries.
• Support the implementation and integration of Reverse ETL solutions, ensuring reliable and high-performance connectivity between data platforms and downstream applications.
• Contribute to scalable, robust and secure data architectures across the wider data estate.
• Lead complex data initiatives from concept through to deployment, working closely with product managers, engineers and technical specialists.

Retail experience is essential for this role. We are looking for someone who understands the complexity of customer data within a large-scale retail environment and has experience working with customer-facing data platforms and ecosystems. You will ideally have:

• Strong commercial experience within the retail sector - essential.
• Deep expertise in data engineering, particularly real-time data processing, API design and distributed systems.
• Strong experience with AWS, Azure or GCP.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code and scalable architecture patterns.
• Strong hands-on experience with SQL and Python.
• Experience with modern data engineering and integration technologies such as Apache Kafka, Airflow and/or dbt.
• Proven experience delivering enterprise-scale customer data solutions, including Customer Data Platforms, Customer 360 or API-based integrations.
• Experience working with customer identity, consent and/or preference management is highly desirable.
• An understanding of MarTech, CRM and digital customer journeys.
• Good knowledge of data privacy, governance and GDPR within customer data environments.
• Strong stakeholder and project management skills, with the ability to lead complex, cross-functional technical implementations.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to engage confidently with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Degree in Computer Science, Information Systems or a related discipline is desirable, although equivalent professional experience will be considered.

Key Requirements

Essential:

• Retail sector experience
• Senior-level Data Engineering experience
• Customer data / Customer 360 experience
• Real-time data processing and integration
• SQL & Python
• Cloud experience - AWS, Azure or GCP
• API design / distributed systems

• Experience with Kafka, Airflow and/or dbt Desirable:

• Customer Data Platform experience
• MarTech / CRM experience
• Reverse ETL
• Customer identity and consent management
• GDPR / data governance experience