Overview
Head of Data Engineering Jobs in Manchester, England, United Kingdom at numi
Title: Head of Data Engineering
Company: numi
Location: Manchester, England, United Kingdom
Head of Data Engineering
Department: Global Technology
Location: Piccadilly, Manchester – hybrid, three days a week in the office.
Contract type: Permanent, full-time (FTE)
Reporting to: Global Data & Systems Director
Manages: Engineering Delivery Lead, Senior Data Engineers, QA / Test Engineers
About Us
We are an international retailer operating hundreds of locations across the UK, France, USA, and Hong Kong, with additional locations run by franchise partners around the world. Our business is transforming from a bricks-and-mortar focused retailer into a truly customer-centric digital business with a leading consumer brand. We are aiming to better understand our customers and their preferences, making this an exciting time to join our team.
About the Programme
This role sits within our Global Data & Systems function and is a critical hire for a strategic 9-month data modernisation programme. The programme will replatform our data and reporting estate onto Snowflake, dbt, Fivetran, and a modern Azure-based integration stack, while retiring legacy MSSQL warehouses. The pace is fast, the scope is broad across our four primary markets, and the expectations of the leadership team are high.
The Role
The Head of Data Engineering will own the design, build, and operation of our modern data engineering estate while leading the engineering workstream of the data modernisation programme. This is a hands-on, accountable, delivery-first leadership role for someone willing to roll up their sleeves alongside the team to make it happen.
You will be responsible for the Snowflake, dbt, Fivetran, and Azure data engineering stack end-to-end, encompassing ingestion, transformation, orchestration, quality, observability, security, and cost. You will set the engineering standards, run the production-grade SDLC, manage the team's capacity against an ambitious roadmap, and be the senior point of escalation.
Because our locations trade seven days a week, data incidents do not always wait for office hours. You will be the senior data engineering escalation point for major incidents and critical change windows, which includes evenings and weekends where required.
Key Responsibilities
- Own the design, build, operation, and roadmap of the data engineering estate, including Snowflake, dbt, Fivetran, Azure Function Apps, Azure Logic Apps, Service Bus, and the migration away from legacy MSSQL warehouses.
- Lead the engineering workstream of the modernisation programme, working to fixed nine-month delivery milestones agreed with CEO-level and CIO stakeholders.
- Recruit, manage, mentor, and retain a high-performing engineering and QA team while managing performance and making hard calls quickly.
- Define and enforce engineering standards encompassing software engineering principles, automated testing, code review, Git version control, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, environment hygiene, change control, and documentation.
- Set the on-call and incident management model for the data engineering team and personally act as the senior escalation point for major incidents during critical out-of-hours periods.
- Own the health, performance, security, and cost of the Snowflake platform across all international markets, including warehouse sizing and capacity planning.
- Manage the controlled, low-risk decommissioning of legacy MSSQL data warehouses alongside reconciliation back to source and parallel running plans.
- Partner with the Head of Integrations to ensure source data from enterprise systems like Workday, Oracle Symphony, NetSuite, and ecommerce platforms lands reliably.
- Partner with the Head of Reporting and Data Governance Manager to guarantee engineered datasets are fit for analytics with stable contracts and agreed SLAs.
- Manage supplier and contractor relationships, covering service levels, commercials, and delivery milestones.
- Report progress, risks, and decisions to senior leadership clearly and without jargon.
- Serve as a credible technical voice capable of diving into code, schema, query plans, or pipeline failures.
Essential Skills and Experience
- 8+ years of experience in data engineering, including 3+ years leading and managing engineering teams of 5+ people through delivery.
- Demonstrable, recent hands-on experience leading a large data platform migration on a short timeline, ideally retiring legacy MSSQL estates onto a cloud data platform like Snowflake.
- Deep, current technical credibility and coding ability across Snowflake, dbt, Fivetran (or equivalent ELT tooling), and SQL.
- Strong working knowledge of Azure data services such as Function Apps, Logic Apps, Service Bus, Data Factory, and storage.
- Experience setting up and running a production-grade data engineering SDLC.
- Experience owning the incident response model for a data engineering team and personally leading major incidents to resolution under pressure.
- A track record of working to fixed senior-stakeholder milestones in a fast-moving environment, possessing the flexibility to work evenings and weekends when demanded by delivery or incidents.
- Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to brief board-level audiences without overstatement.
- Strong commercial awareness regarding cloud cost drivers and contract levers.
- Right to work in the UK without sponsorship.
Desirable Skills and Experience
- SnowPro Advanced certification or equivalent.
- Experience operating across multiple geographic markets and coordinating out-of-hours across time zones.
- Experience integrating data from enterprise SaaS systems like Workday, Oracle Symphony, or NetSuite.
- Familiarity with Microsoft OneLake / Fabric and Power BI as a downstream consumer.
- Experience modernizing a data estate inside a retail, hospitality, or QSR business.
- Exposure to data governance, lineage, and cataloguing tooling.
