Senior Director, Data Engineering & Services

Salary: £60,000 - 100,000 per year

Requirements:

• Proven experience building strong partnerships with product, business, and technology leaders to align data strategy, accelerate delivery, and increase the strategic value of data.
• Extensive experience in data engineering or related fields, with deep expertise in designing, building, and scaling enterprise-grade data solutions for analytics, experimentation, and machine learning.
• Proven track record of delivering high-quality, reusable, and trusted data products across complex global organizations, ideally in a federated or data-mesh-style ownership model on a shared central platform.
• Deep expertise in data architecture and modeling, including scalable ELT and ETL frameworks and distributed processing systems for batch and real-time workloads.
• Proven success modernizing data platforms using Snowflake, Databricks, dbt, Kafka, and open lakehouse formats such as Apache Iceberg, with a strong focus on data quality, lineage, observability, and reliability.
• Familiarity with modern data observability and quality monitoring tooling is a strong advantage.
• Proven data engineering modernization and migration experience, moving legacy pipelines and tooling onto a modern ELT standard at scale.
• Track record of upleveling data engineering teams with AI tools and automation to raise productivity and quality.
• Skilled in cloud-native data ecosystems, with AWS preferred; Azure or GCP also valued.
• Experience with modern governance practices and trusted access tools such as Atlan for catalog and lineage and policy engines for fine-grained data access.
• Demonstrated ability to design and deliver domain-aligned data products with clear contracts, service levels, and consumers.
• Familiarity with attribution and identity resolution, causal measurement, and experimentation at scale.
• Experience working across data privacy and regulatory frameworks in global data operations.
• Proven leadership experience building, mentoring, and growing high-performing global engineering teams with a culture of inclusion, innovation, accountability, and test-and-learn.
• Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to bridge technical depth and business impact.
• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related technical field.

Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the long-term data engineering strategy that powers our Connected Data Ecosystem, aligned to strategic business priorities and customer lifetime value.
• Operate our federated ownership model in practice by holding domain teams accountable for data products built on the centralized platform and central standards.
• Partner with business and product leaders to identify and deliver the most valuable data opportunities across Player, Creator, Publisher, and Enterprise domains.
• Sequence work based on commercial impact and ensure teams build for insight velocity, reusability, and scalability.
• Develop a high-performance engineering culture built on quality, ownership, test-and-learn, and continuous improvement across our global data teams.
• Lead the design, architecture, and execution of domain data products on our centralized lakehouse platform.
• Deliver decision- and AI-ready data pipelines and foundational datasets that power analytics, reporting, personalization, experimentation, and operational intelligence.
• Establish and scale standards for data modeling, integration, processing, quality, lineage, observability, and governed staging.
• Lead modernization of our data engineering stack, advancing a modern dbt-based ELT standard on Snowflake and Databricks and migrating legacy pipelines onto it.
• Establish data observability as a first-class platform capability with automated monitoring, anomaly detection, lineage, and clear SLAs.
• Optimize for data usability, trust, performance, cost efficiency, and reliability as engineered properties of the platform.
• Ensure our data engineering outputs meet enterprise standards for security, privacy, and compliance, including fine-grained access controls.
• Partner with the central Data Platform organization and the AI/ML Center of Excellence so domain data products plug into shared platform, experimentation, real-time decisioning, and ML services.
• Collaborate with Analytics, BI, AI/ML, and Platform teams so data assets are discoverable, governed, and integrated into analytical and operational tools.
• Work closely with Data Governance, Privacy, and Security teams to ensure responsible data use and compliance.
• Drive adoption of data products through discoverability, documentation, and seamless integration into workflows and decision systems.
• Lead initiatives to optimize data operations, improve pipeline efficiency, and reduce total cost of ownership.
• Champion streaming, near-real-time, and event-driven architectures that improve agility and shorten the path from event to insight to action.
• Uplevel our data engineering teams with AI tools and embed AI-assisted development into everyday workflows.
• Partner with platform engineering to implement self-serve capabilities that improve practitioner productivity and reduce reliance on bespoke pipelines.

Technologies:

• AI
• AWS
• Azure
• Cloud
• Databricks
• ETL
• GCP
• Hardware
• Kafka
• Machine Learning
• Network
• Security
• Snowflake
• dbt
• Support
• SQL

More:

We are Sony Interactive Entertainment, the company behind the PlayStation brand and part of Sony Group Corporation. We are a dynamic technology company delivering cutting-edge hardware and network services to more than 100 million people, and we are home to some of the worlds most beloved entertainment IP. In this senior leadership role, you will help shape our Connected Data Ecosystem across Player, Partner, and Enterprise domains. We offer a hybrid working model within Flexmodes, discretionary bonus opportunity, private medical insurance, dental scheme, 25 days holiday per year, an on-site gym, subsidised café, free soft drinks, an on-site bar, and access to a cycle garage and showers. We are an equal opportunity and fair chance employer, committed to inclusion and diversity, and we conduct background checks at the offer stage.

last updated 34 week of 2026