Ocho
Staff Data Engineer
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Staff Data Engineer
Staff Data Engineer
At-a-Glance
£80,000 to £90,000 salary Belfast or hybrid working Modern stack: Spark, Kafka, Apache Airflow, DBT, Snowflake, AWS Build data systems for market-leading technology company at global consumer scale
About the Company
Our client is a global technology company that connects thousands of brands, retailers, and billions of consumers via:
- User-generated content
- Product reviews
- Shopping insights
Founded in 2005, US-headquartered with offices in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. They have a strong engineering presence in Belfast and are a certified Great Place to Work in the UK and other countries.
Key cultural values:
- Innovation
- Experimentation
- Transparency
The Role
You’ll join the Insights team as a Staff Data Engineer, responsible for designing, building, and supporting scalable data systems that power key business products and services. This is a role with true architectural authority, requiring you to make end-to-end design decisions—including ingestion, processing, storage, retrieval—while owning non-functional requirements like reliability, scalability, and performance.
Ideal for engineers who can personally explain major design choices rather than relying on team collaboration. Interviews will explore the why behind your past decisions in depth.
Key Responsibilities
- Design & Build: Large-scale, distributed data systems and pipelines supporting core products and services.
- End-to-End Ownership: Drive design decisions—file formats, layer transitions, parameter trade-offs—with reasoning and rationale.
- Non-Functional Requirements: Define and enforce reliability, scalability, performance across data platform.
- Pipeline & Storage: Develop and optimize data pipelines, storage, and retrieval processes.
- Engineering Standards: Champion software engineering best practices in testing, CI/CD, version control.
- Collaboration: Bridge between data teams and business stakeholders to deliver maintainable solutions.
- Troubleshooting: Investigate and resolve data infrastructure issues independently.
- Innovation: Evaluate and integrate emerging data tools and technologies that provide leveraged value.
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Requirements
Essential:
✅ 7+ years designing and building robust, scalable distributed data systems in open-source/public cloud environments. ✅ Deep hands-on expertise with Spark or similar frameworks (Flask, Apache Beam, etc.). Demonstrate direct build-and-tune experience. ✅ Ownership of end-to-end data architecture, with ability to explain reasoning for choices like:
- File formats
- Layer transitions in a medallion architecture
- Trade-offs in system design ✅ Direct experience defining non-functional requirements ('not outsourced to adjacent teams). ✅ Strong Apache Airflow or Dagster expertise for orchestration. ✅ Big data storage & processing experience across:
- DBT, SQL, Athena/Trino, Redshift, Snowflake, or RDBMS (e.g., PostgreSQL/MySQL)
- With performance tuning/optimisation and indexing ✅ Event-driven architecture & streaming skills: Kafka, Kafka Streams, or Apache Flink. ✅ Cloud expertise (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with Terraform. ✅ Strong software engineering practices:
- Testing (unit, integration, acceptance)
- CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitHub Actions)
- Agile development processes
- CI approaches (git)
- Containerization (Docker) ✅ BSc in Computer Science or related field.
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Desirable / Nice-to-Have:
⭐ Experience in high-volume consumer, e-commerce, or retail data platforms. ⭐ Technical leadership or mentorship experience within engineering teams.
Benefits
£80,000 to £90,000 salary Hybrid or on-site from a well-established Belfast engineering hub Staff-level authority with genuine end-to-end architectural and direction ownership Work on systems impacting global scale—billions of consumer interactions Great Place to Work™ culture: innovating, not imitating Agile, experimental mindset—embracing advantage through adaptability
Next Steps
Apply or learn more by reaching out to Luke Davidson at Ocho People: 📧 luke@ochopeople.com 🔗 LinkedIn (replace with profile link if available) 📄 Submit your CV today
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