Data Engineering Lead

Salary: £32,000 - 72,000 per year

Requirements:

• Hands-on, expert-level experience with BigQuery and GCP, including building and operating production data pipelines on this stack
• Strong Python skills used daily for pipeline development, data transformation and automation
• Experience across at least two of the three core data domains: Customer, Commercial and Operations
• A track record of evolving data architecture, with concrete examples of changing how a business structures, stores or consumes its data
• Deep understanding of data modelling, pipeline design and distributed data architecture
• Experience with Dataform or dbt for data transformation
• Demonstrated use of AI in data engineering, such as AI-assisted pipeline development, automated quality checks or similar practical applications
• Experience mentoring and developing engineers
• Experience building towards a Customer Data Platform or equivalent customer data consolidation project
• Familiarity with data governance principles and working alongside a governance function
• E-commerce or retail background
• Experience with streaming or real-time data pipelines

Responsibilities:

• Own the data engineering architecture for our business, defining how data is ingested, transformed, stored and made available across Customer, Commercial and Operations domains
• Design consistent standards and patterns across all three domains, ensuring shared attributes are handled uniformly and data can be reliably joined across domains
• Lead the evolution of our BigQuery/GCP platform, driving migrations, modernising legacy pipelines and building for scalability
• Make key architectural decisions and be accountable for the technical quality of everything the engineering team produces
• Develop and enforce engineering standards across the team, including version control, testing frameworks, error handling, documentation and code review practices
• Lead the build-out of structured, reliable domain datasets, moving from disparate, siloed data sources towards consolidated Customer, Commercial and Operations data platforms
• Work towards the foundations of a single source of truth, defining how data from different source systems is reconciled, deduplicated and mastered within each domain
• Ensure domain datasets are structured for downstream consumption by analytics teams, data science models, BI tooling and AI or agent use cases
• Champion the use of AI in data engineering and embed AI-assisted development in how we work
• Apply AI tools to accelerate pipeline development, automated testing, anomaly detection and data quality monitoring
• Stay current with AI developments in the data engineering space and bring new approaches into the teams practice
• Work closely with our engineering partner, understanding what they provide at the platform layer and building effectively on top of it
• Define clear requirements and interface standards for how data feeds into domain datasets
• Identify and escalate where platform behaviour affects data quality or availability within our domains
• Manage, coach and develop a team of six domain-aligned engineers
• Run a structured review and development process for each engineer, building their technical capability and career progression
• Foster a culture of engineering excellence, collaboration and continuous improvement

Technologies:

• AI
• BigQuery
• GCP
• Support
• Python
• Security
• dbt
• Cloud
• Embedded
• PLC

More:

We are THG, a global ecommerce group on a mission to be the global online leader in beauty and sports nutrition. Our portfolio of leading retailers and brands includes LOOKFANTASTIC, Myprotein, ESPA, Perricone MD and Cult Beauty across our two core businesses, THG Beauty and THG Nutrition. We are a team of over 2,500 people working from Manchester to New York, and we believe in working together, leading by example and thinking big. This role is based at our Icon 1 location in WA15 0AF within our Central Functions team, which supports the wider business by keeping operations running smoothly, from pay and procurement to legal, health, safety and security. We offer career development through bespoke programmes and upskilling, 25 days of annual leave plus bank holidays, birthday leave, enhanced maternity and paternity pay, compassionate leave, buy-back holiday options and volunteer leave, plus wellbeing support including GP appointments, an employee assistance programme, an on-site gym and physio. Other benefits include tech salary sacrifice, a subsidised bus pass, up to 50% staff discount on THG brands, an on-site staff shop, referral rewards and anniversary gifts. We are proud to be a Disability Confident Committed employer and welcome applications from all sections of the community.

last updated 35 week of 2026