Staff Data Engineer - Data Channels

Salary: £44,000 - 84,000 per year

Requirements:

• Significant experience designing, building and operating modern data platforms and data engineering solutions at scale.
• Strong expertise in batch, streaming and event-driven architectures, including hands-on experience with Kafka and real-time data processing technologies.
• Deep understanding of software engineering best practices including architecture, testing strategies, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability and DevSecOps.
• Strong experience working with modern cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure or GCP, including cloud-native data services.
• Proven experience with data engineering technologies such as Snowflake, SQL, Python, dbt and orchestration frameworks.
• Strong knowledge of data modelling, data quality, lineage, metadata management, reconciliation and data governance.
• Experience implementing secure data solutions, including GDPR, PII handling, role-based access controls and audit requirements.
• Ability to evaluate and communicate technical trade-offs across cost, scalability, performance, resilience and delivery risk.
• Demonstrated experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams without direct authority.
• Strong stakeholder management skills with the ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Proven track record of coaching and developing engineers while raising engineering standards across teams.
• Passion for continuous improvement and driving pragmatic, customer-focused engineering outcomes.
• Experience within large-scale retail, eCommerce or customer-focused digital organisations.
• Knowledge of customer data platforms, data products, personalisation and identity solutions.
• Experience supporting AI, analytics or machine learning data platforms.
• Familiarity with modern BI and reporting ecosystems.
• Experience working within highly distributed, microservices-based architectures.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and implementation of scalable, secure and resilient data platforms, pipelines and services.
• Define technical direction across multiple teams, ensuring consistency, simplification and long-term maintainability.
• Drive architecture and design reviews for complex data engineering initiatives.
• Establish and evolve engineering standards, patterns and best practices across data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, testing, monitoring and data quality.
• Coach and mentor Engineers and Senior Engineers through design reviews, pairing, code reviews and technical leadership.
• Collaborate with Product, Architecture, Security, Governance, BI and Data & Analytics teams to deliver coherent and commercially effective solutions.
• Support planning and delivery processes by identifying technical dependencies, risks, non-functional requirements and implementation approaches.
• Champion operational excellence through observability, monitoring, alerting, incident learning and continuous improvement.
• Ensure data governance, security, GDPR and PII considerations are embedded into solution design from the outset.

Technologies:

• AI
• AWS
• Azure
• CI/CD
• Cloud
• DevSecOps
• Embedded
• GCP
• Support
• Kafka
• Machine Learning
• Python
• SQL
• Security
• Snowflake
• dbt
• microservices
• XP

More:

We are Sainsburys Tech, working at truly extraordinary scale across one of the UKs largest retail and digital ecosystems, powered by insights from over 10 million Nectar customers and modern cloud platforms across AWS, Azure and GCP. We offer a highly influential Staff Engineer - Data Engineering role with hybrid and flexible working, competitive salary and annual bonus, pension scheme, private healthcare, generous holiday allowance, colleague discount across Sainsburys, Argos and Habitat, wellbeing support, lifestyle benefits and career development opportunities. We are committed to being an inclusive retailer, we support flexible working where possible, and we invest heavily in engineering standards, learning and development. This role offers a strong pathway toward Principal Engineer and the opportunity to help shape the future of data engineering for millions of customers.

last updated 36 week of 2026