Senior Data Engineer at Carwow

OUR MISSION To become the car-changing destination of choice. By combining technology, media and deep automotive expertise, we've turned how people buy, sell, advertise and lease cars on its head. What started as a simple reviews site is now one of the largest online car-changing destinations in Europe. Last year alone we grew over 50% with nearly £3bn worth of cars bought on site, while £1.8bn of cars were listed for sale through our Sell My Car service. In 2024 we went big and acquired Autovia - creators of AutoExpress and Evo magazines - doubling our audience overnight. Together we now have one of the biggest YouTube [Upgrade to PRO to see link] channels in the world with almost 10m subscribers and over 1.1 billion annual views, while we sell 1.2 million print copies of our magazines and have an annual web content reach over 350million. And we’re a long way from done! ABOUT THE TEAM As a team our mission is to empower all Carwow teams with access to reliable, actionable data and enable informed decision-making through scalable and secure data platforms. We’re investing heavily in our Data Engineering capabilities at carwow, ensuring we have the expertise to deliver a robust data pipelines and platform management capabilities that support the growing needs of our Data Analytics team. We build our ETL pipelines in Python and dbt-flavoured SQL, using Airflow to automate workflows, with data ingested into Snowflake and BigQuery warehouses from various in-house and 3rd party sources (mostly using Fivetran) and Terraform to manage infrastructure. Our product tech stack is primarily Ruby on Rails using PostgreSQL, all hosted on Heroku. We use Terraform to manage our infrastructure and encourage teams to be involved in how we deploy and run our code in Production. You'll be supported by one of our Engineering Managers who are there to help you with your career progression and ensure that the team you are on are working as well as they can - continuously improving! We have a well-defined career progression framework that means you know what is expected of you and how you can progress through our career ladder and your EM will work with you to make sure you are happy, fulfilled, and doing the best work you can be doing. WHAT YOU’LL DO - ETL/ELT Data Pipelines: Leading the design, development, and maintenance of robust ETL/ELT data pipelines. - SQL Queries: Writing, optimising, and reviewing advanced SQL queries for data extraction and transformation. - Data Workflows: Implementing and managing sophisticated data workflows and dependencies using tools like Airflow. - Data Models and Warehouses: Designing, building, and maintaining advanced data models and data warehouses using Snowflake, BigQuery and similar technologies. - Cross-functional Collaboration: Collaborating with cross-functional teams to understand complex data requirements and deliver efficient solutions. - Data Quality: Ensuring high data quality, integrity, and security across the data lifecycle. - Platform and Process Improvement: Continuously improving data engineering processes and infrastructure, implementing best practices, and ensuring our platform is performant, secure, and cost-efficient. - Pipeline Improvement: Design, develop, and maintain automated ML pipelines alongside our data scientists to streamline model training, validation, and deployment processes. - AI Champion: You actively leverage AI tools to accelerate your own output and you help to drive wider productivity and efficiency gains through mentoring and knowledge sharing. - Data Governance: Partner with our Security and Legal teams to implement automated data masking, PII management, and access control policies, and lead the implementation of data catalogs and lineage tracking to ensure data is discoverable, documented, and trusted across the entire Carwow Group. WHAT YOU’LL NEED While time spent in data engineering roles is important, we prioritise attitude, aptitude, and the kind of impact you’ve had over years' experience. Ideally, you: - Have significant experience in software or data engineering, preferably in a senior or lead role, primarily around data warehouse design and management centred around Snowflake or BigQuery. - Are highly proficient in writing Python and SQL. - Have extensive experience building and optimising complex ETL/ELT data pipelines. - Have used data transformation tools like dbt. - Are skilled in managing and optimising script dependencies with tools like Airflow. - Have substantial experience designing and maintaining data warehouses using Snowflake or similar technologies. - Experience leading and mentoring junior data engineers, and guiding teams through complex projects. - Ability to contribute to the strategic direction of data engineering practices and technologies within the organisation. - Cloud Expertise: Familiarity with Google Cloud Platform, particularly Vertex AI, and its machine learning tools. - Nice to have: experience with Terraform, Ruby, data visualisation tools (e.g., Looker, Tableau, Power BI), Amplitude, Hightouch, Fivetran, DevOps, Heroku, Kafka, AWS/GCP etc. You’re not expected to be an expert in all of these technologies and tools, we are happy to support your learning journey. If you’re unsure about any of the above, please apply. WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU - 💻 Fully remote working role, with offices in London, Munich, Madrid, and Porto that you can work from - 🏢 4-5 trips to the London office for social and team bonding events - 💸 Competitive comp package - 🌴 28 days' holiday increasing to 35 with length of service, plus extras for house moves, weddings and more! - 📈 Employee-friendly share options - 💰 Pension scheme via Royal London - up to 5% company contribution - ❤️‍🩹 Vitality private healthcare insurance - 💵 Life Assurance - 4x annual salary - 💚 Monthly coaching sessions with Spill - our mental wellbeing partner - 👪 Inclusive parental, partner and shared parental leave including up to 20 weeks' full pay maternity and shared parental leave, and 8 weeks' full partner pay, as well as fertility treatment and pregnancy loss policies - 🧒🏽 Bubble childcare support and discounted nanny fees for little ones - 🏖️ 'Work from abroad for a month' annual scheme - 🧠 Generous learning and development budget - 🖥️ £500/€550 home office budget Diversity and inclusion is an integral part of our culture. We know that diverse teams are strong teams, so we welcome those with alternative identities, backgrounds, and experiences to apply for this position. We make recruiting decisions based on experience, skills and potential, so all our applicants are treated fairly and equally.