ITV
Lead Data Engineer
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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.
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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.
Your work matters to millions.
Shaping culture is in the DNA of ITV. So, it’s not surprising that you’ll find us in every home in the UK, our productions are famous all over the world and we’re at the forefront of the digital streaming revolution.
Get help with your application
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When you join us, you enter a fun working environment. With opportunities to learn, to grow and make a real difference. Small enough that your impact’s felt in the business, but big enough that your impact reaches millions of people.
Come develop your skills, change TV and the course of your career. Don’t just watch it. Be part of it. Join ITV.
ITV is for everyone.
ITV strongly encourages applications for this role from disabled people. As a Disability Confident Leader, if you meet the minimum criteria for a role and you have declared that you are disabled, we’ll guarantee to take you to the next stage* (minimum criteria above).
We're happy to discuss any support/personalisation you may need during our application and selection process as part of our reasonable adjustments. Drop us a line if you require anything at talkingcareers@itv.com. Find out more about applying with a disability [https://careers.itv.com/blog/joining-itv-with-a-disability].
- There may be a few exceptions where we are not able to take all eligible candidates to the next stage due to the volume of applications.
Because those who make an impact deserve to be rewarded for it.
ITV offers some great rewards and benefits including:
- Flexible working with a range of options to suit everyone
- Generous holiday allowance, plus you can buy more
- Annual bonus opportunity
- Competitive pension contribution
- Save as you earn - with an opportunity to buy ITV shares
- Wellbeing and volunteering days plus a wide range of opportunities to help you live a balanced and healthy life
More about our benefits [https://careers.itv.com/life-at-itv/the-benefits]
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