Data Engineering Lead

Data Engineering Lead

Do you enjoy Team Management? Are you a team player?

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 Enterprise Data Platforms and Services (EDPS) team is 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. The technology underpinning these capabilities includes 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.

As the Software Engineering Lead, you will nurture 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 the technical subject matter expert overseeing the squad building an Enterprise Data Platform that supports both operational and analytical use cases.

You will combine technical expertise with strong stakeholder engagement to understand business needs when designing a fit-for-purpose technical solution. You will map user requirements and diverse interactions with platform components to inform implementation decisions, and collaborate closely with other technology teams to promote a culture of contributing towards shared services.

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

• Accountable for team performance – manage a high performing agile delivery squad, nurturing skills, trust, and relationships through coaching and mentoring.

• Accountable for releases – set technical development and coding standards that comprise a robust SDLC, and review releases to ensure standards are met.

• Accountable for shared services – build common frameworks and patterns that can be reused, contributed to, and reliably deployed by other teams via self-service.

• Accountable for best practices – establish component-specific guidelines in collaboration with the team, wider engineering teams, architecture, end-users, data product owners, and enablement teams, and promote them through regular knowledge sharing sessions.

• Accountable for operational efficiency – drive improvements in efficiency, reliability, and scalability supported by logging, monitoring and observability as foundational capability.

• Responsible for adoption – promote platform capabilities through technical communities of practice leadership, maintain high internal standards for documented processes and guides, and capture and act on user feedback.

• Responsible for platform evolution – collaborate with stakeholders to 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 govern self-service use of the platform.

• Essential Skills & Experience:

• Team leadership – driven line manager and technical lead, focused on coaching and mentoring to motivate cross-functional squads.

• SDLC – applied understanding of SDLC best practices, with a track record of improving SDLC and DataOps/DevOps maturity.

• Agile delivery – facilitating ceremonies, removing impediments, refining requirements, and fostering 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) for self-service workloads.

• Coding languages – Python, JavaScript, and Jinja templating for ETL/ELT data applications, data pipelines, and stored procedures.

• Thought leadership and influencing – strong interest in the data platforms landscape with proposals supported by research and value delivery.

• Solution design and architecture – ability to create comprehensive technical design documents, including architecture and infrastructure artifacts to support scalable, secure, efficient data platforms with reliable data flow from ingestion to consumption.

• AWS cloud ecosystem – deep knowledge of AWS data and analytics services and production-grade data solutions.

• Prioritisation – adaptable to changing needs with professional, flexible, and pragmatic responses to evolving priorities while mitigating impacts.

• Data and technology governance – applying data management, privacy and security practices at scale to ensure compliant platform use.

• 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 offer an appealing working prospect. We have wellbeing initiatives, shared parental leave, study assistance and sabbaticals to help you meet responsibilities and long-term goals.

Working remotely from home or in our office in a flexible hybrid style. Working flexible hours to fit your productivity peaks.

We are an equal opportunity employer with a commitment to help you succeed. We promote a diverse, inclusive, collaborative, and innovative environment where everyone has a part to play.

At Elsevier, your wellbeing and happiness are key to a long and successful career. Benefits include: generous holiday allowance, learning time, private medical benefits, wellbeing programs, life assurance, pension, long service awards, share option schemes, travel loan, parental leave, emergency care support, and RELX Cares days. We also offer employee discounts and access to various learning resources.

A global leader in information and analytics, we help researchers and healthcare professionals advance science and improve health outcomes for the benefit of society. We are committed to equal opportunity and provide an accessible hiring process. If you require accommodation, please let us know through provided contacts.