Data Engineering Lead

RELX; Oxford; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 100,000

Job description

Data Engineering Lead

Do you enjoy Team Management?

Are you a team player?

About Us

A global leader in information and analytics, we help researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society. Building on our publishing heritage, we combine quality information and vast data sets with analytics to support visionary science and research, health education and interactive learning, as well as exceptional healthcare and clinical practice. At Elsevier, your work contributes to the world’s grand challenges and a more sustainable future. We harness innovative technologies to support science and healthcare to partner for a better world.

The Team

The Enterprise Data Platforms and Services (EDPS) team are a central technology group responsible for building, administering, governing, and setting global standards for a growing number of Elsevier strategic data platforms and services. The capabilities we are responsible for enable data to be collected, accessed, processed and integrated across a wide range of digital business solutions, used by functions including billing and order management, customer and product master data management, and business analytics and insights delivery. Due to our footprint across the enterprise, we are relied upon to ensure our systems are trusted, reliable and available. The technology underpinning these capabilities includes industry leading data and analytics products such as Snowflake, Tableau, DBT, Talend, Collibra, Kafka/Confluent, Astronomer/Airflow, and Kubernetes.

This forms part of a longer-term strategic direction to implement Data Mesh, and with it establish shared platforms that enable a connected collection of enterprise-ready time-saving services, applying a self-service first approach. Our mission is to enable frictionless experiences for all Elsevier colleagues, so that they can openly and securely consume and produce trustworthy data, enhancing everyday colleague and customer interactions and decisions.

The Role

As the Software Engineering Lead, you will be responsible for nurturing a high performing cross-functional squad of software and data engineers. This squad is responsible for a growing number of strategic capabilities and components that serve a large number of engineering, data science, and analytics use cases and stakeholders. You will be expected to be the technical subject matter expert overseeing the squad building an Enterprise Data Platform that supports both operational and analytical use cases.

In practice, this will mean combining your technical expertise with strong stakeholder engagement to build a deep understanding of business needs when designing a technical solution that is fit-for-purpose. To be successful, you need to understand user requirements and map diverse user interactions with the various platform components to inform your implementation decisions. You will be expected to collaborate closely with other technology teams to ensure that we are driving a culture of contributing towards shared services.

Your success will be primarily measured by demonstrable increases in the number of teams adopting and contributing to the platform capabilities and shared repositories we provision, and clear improvements in technical efficiency/value gains.

Key Responsibilities and Accountabilities:

• Accountable for team performance – manage a high performing agile delivery squad, ensuring you nurture team skills, trust, and relationships through coaching and mentoring.
• Accountable for releases – set technical development and coding standards that make up a robust and mature SDLC, and review team releases to guarantee these are met.
• Accountable for shared services – build common frameworks and patterns that can be easily reused, contributed to, and reliably deployed by other teams via self-service.
• Accountable for best practices – establish component specific guidelines in collaboration with your team, wider engineering teams, architecture, end-users, data product owners, and enablement teams, to promote these through regular knowledge sharing sessions.
• Accountable for operational efficiency – drive improvements in efficiency, reliability, and scalability supported by logging, monitoring and observability as a foundational capability.
• Responsible for adoption – promote the platform capabilities through technical communities of practice leadership, high internal standards for documented processes and internal guides, and take steps to capture and action user feedback.
• Responsible for platform evolution – collaborate with key stakeholder groups to analyse and identify capability gaps, and drive discussions required to make a case for change.
• Responsible for technical governance – establish and manage the technical design authority process for each capability to successfully govern self-service use of the platform.

Essential Skills & Experience:

• Team leadership – driven line manager and technical lead, deeply interested in coaching and mentoring, to motivate cross functional squads to deliver complex technical initiatives.
• Software development lifecycle (SDLC) – applied understanding of SDLC best practices, having delivered improvements in previous teams’ SDLC and DataOps/DevOps maturity.
• Agile delivery – facilitating ceremonies, removing impediments, coordinating requirements refinement to ensure tasks are achievable, and driving a culture of iterative improvement.
• Modern data stack – hands-on deployment and governance of enterprise technologies at scale (e.g. Snowflake, Tableau, DBT, Fivetran, Airflow, AWS, GitHub, Terraform, etc.) for self-service workloads.
• Coding languages – deployable and reusable Python, JavaScript, and Jinja templating languages for ETL/ELT data applications, data pipelines, and stored procedures.
• Thought leadership and influencing – deep interest in data platforms landscape to build well-articulated proposals that are supported by strong research, value delivery, and previous success in driving but also adopting change.
• Solution design and architecture – apt at creating comprehensive technical design documents, including architecture and infrastructure artifacts, to support scalable, secure, and efficient data platforms, ensuring reliable data flows from ingestion to consumption.
• AWS cloud ecosystem – deep knowledge of AWS data and analytics services and the infrastructure required for production grade data solutions and applications.
• Prioritisation – adaptable to changing needs within the organisation with a professional, flexible and pragmatic response to rapidly evolving priorities, while mitigating impacts.
• Data and technology governance – knowledgeable in applying data management, data privacy and data security practices at scale to ensure platform use is compliant.

Work in a way that works for you

We promote a healthy work/life balance across the organisation. With an average length of service of 9 years, we are confident that we offer an appealing working prospect for our people. With numerous wellbeing initiatives, shared parental leave, study assistance and sabbaticals, we will help you meet your immediate responsibilities and long-term goals.

• Working remotely from home or in our office in a flexible hybrid style
• Working flexible hours - flexing the times when you work in the day to help you fit everything in and work when you are the most productive

Working with us

We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to help you succeed. Here, you will find an inclusive, agile, collaborative, innovative and fun environment, where everyone has a part to play. Regardless of the team you join, we promote a diverse environment with co-workers who are passionate about what they do, and how they do it.

Working for you

At Elsevier, we know that your wellbeing and happiness are key to a long and successful career. These are some of the benefits we are delighted to offer:

• Generous holiday allowance with the option to buy additional days
• Access to learning platforms and encouragement to book up to 10 days focused learning/development time per year
• Health screening, eye care vouchers and private medical benefits
• Wellbeing programs
• Life assurance
• Access to a competitive contributory pension scheme
• Long service awards
• Save As You Earn share option scheme
• Travel Season ticket loan
• Maternity, paternity and shared parental leave
• Access to emergency care for both the elderly and children
• RELX Cares days, giving you time to support the charities and causes that matter to you
• Access to employee resource groups with dedicated time to volunteer
• Access to extensive learning and development resources
• Access to employee discounts via Perks at Work

About the Business

A global leader in information and analytics, we help researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society. Building on our publishing heritage, we combine quality information and vast data sets with analytics to support visionary science and research, health education and interactive learning, as well as exceptional healthcare and clinical practice. At Elsevier, your work contributes to the world’s grand challenges and a more sustainable future. We harness innovative technologies to support science and healthcare to partner for a better world.