Head of Data Engineering
Commercial Technology & Change
Permanent | Full Time
Office location White City, London | Hybrid
Hiring range: £90,000 - £105,000 + Bonus
For more information please email TalkingCareers@itv.com
Your work matters to millions.
Shaping culture is in the DNA of ITV. So, it’s not surprising that you’ll find us in every home in the UK, our productions are famous all over the world and we’re at the forefront of the digital streaming revolution.
When you join us, you enter a fun working environment. With opportunities to learn, to grow and make a real difference. Small enough that your impact’s felt in the business, but big enough that your impact reaches millions of people.
Come develop your skills, change TV and the course of your career. Don’t just watch it. Be part of it. Join ITV.
Your impact sends ripples.
The team
Millions of people use the products we build. We're customer focused, informed by data and have a product mindset, using state-of-the-art cloud-first technology. Iterating and evolving daily. In a fast-changing world, we not only make sure our systems work effectively but our Technology teams are spearheading the transformation to a digital-first business. There’s never been a more exciting time to join us.
As part of the Advanced Advertising Technology team, the focus is on data analytics, monetisation and financial governance. When you join us, you enter a fun working environment with opportunities to learn, to grow and make a real difference. Small enough that your impact’s felt in the business, but big enough that your impact reaches millions of people.
The role
This is a senior role within the Commercial Technology and Change engineering team, responsible for shaping and building our data architecture, data engineering and data science competencies across our delivery teams
We have exciting opportunities across a wide range of transformational initiatives with Commercial, including:
- Telligence Insights - unlocking data about our customers to power relationship, sales & trading conversations
- Telligence Core - a new E2E initiative looking at automating and simplifying out propositions and process, with convergence at its heart
- Planet V & Self Serve - continuing to evolve our strategic self serve offering to our buyers, expanding capabilities and scope of inventory and products.
The role will span these initiatives providing data engineering/science direction and oversight, delivered through data centric specialists.
Capability Development
- Build & line-manage a diverse, supportive, excellence-focused data engineering & science culture and discipline
- Manage the capacity, recruitment, coaching and development of our data engineering and data science capability by establishing personal training programmes
- Advise and lead the selection and day to day management of our related technical suppliers and partners
Technical Direction and Delivery
- Own and deliver our data engineering vision
- Direct key technical choices of related platforms, services, tools, development languages and other tools
- Oversee the data aspects of feature designs and align those with our data strategy, data architecture and best practices
- Define and promote our optimal data pipeline architecture approach and commonality of implementation across development teams
- Own the catalogue of conceptual, logical, and physical data assets and how they are stored and managed throughout their lifecycle - data architecture
- Identify, design, and implement internal process improvements: automating manual processes, optimising data delivery, re-designing infrastructure for greater scalability
- Establish an overall culture and ways of working which nurtures and evolves:
o Robust technical best practices and standards within the data engineering team (covering coding style, security, operability and so on).
o DevSecOps mindset, practices and tooling to help feature delivery in a secure, robust and operationally sound manner.
o Management of design/code quality and technical debt to achieve an appropriate balance between short-term delivery and long-term maintainability.
o Agile ways of working within the data engineering team working closely with delivery managers to plan and manage technical delivery with a good level of predictability and efficiency
- Implement standards and best practices to ensure designs adhere to data compliance policies (including, but not limited to: GDPR & ITV confidentiality of data)
Collaboration
- Via your team support the feature design and engineering processes and look to establish and improve ways of working across these teams
- Work with stakeholders including the executive, product, data and design teams to assist with data-related technical issues and support their data infrastructure needs
- Work closely with other heads of department to align data focused test strategies and practices to promote automated testing spanning both functional and non functional (security, scalability and performance etc)
Operations
- Lead and guide team participation in issue resolution by identifying and addressing root causes of data related failures
- Promote a long term design philosophy to proactively reduce incidents and firefighting
- Align the data team’s goals and priorities with the engineering teams related service KPIs, incident KPIs, DORA metrics etc
Skills you’ll need (minimum criteria)
Strong leadership,- and mentorship skills, including the ability to create and maintain a positive culture and drive results through others
- Ability to lead a data engineering, or data science, function at a similar scale using agile and hybrid development approaches
- Led and/or executed a design authority / governance process
- Experience in designing and building out data products on data platforms such as Data Bricks, Google BigQuery or Amazon RedShift etc
- Experience with data pipeline and workflow management tools, for example: Azkaban, Luigi, Airflow, etc
- Experience of the practical application of advanced statistical methods, data mining techniques, and information retrieval against large, complex, highly dimensional data sets from numerous and technically disperse sources
- Technical competency in the areas of distributed computing tools such as Hadoop as well as experience working with big data technologies such as Kafka, Cassandra, Presto etc
- Historically strong programming/scripting skills in languages such as Python and SQL. In addition, deep understanding of relational and non-relational databases systems such as SQL, Redshift, PostgreSQL or Cassandra
- Experience with cloud computing platforms and services - AWS and DevOps and CI/CD practices
- Experience managing AWS cloud enabled data management and analytics/AI related tools and platforms, including championing tools selection; development and maintenance of selection framework; engagement with users and vendors for POC; and engagement with procurement for vendor contracts
Other things we’re looking for (key criteria)
Knowledge of the UK broadcast industry & broadcast/OTT advertising market
- Knowledge of digital marketing and advertising industry
- Familiar with modern machine learning techniques for classification and regression as well as knowledge of A/B testing, experimental design, and general statistical modelling
- Familiarity with AI/ML tools to drive decisions on AI/ML tools selection, for example TensorFlow
- Familiarity with architecture disciplines such as Data Architecture, BI Architecture and Enterprise Architecture
- Knowledge of tools across other data management capabilities – data engineering, data governance, data quality, metadata management and master data management
ITV is for everyone.
ITV strongly encourages applications for this role from disabled people. As a Disability Confident Leader, if you meet the minimum criteria for a role and you have declared that you are disabled, we’ll guarantee to take you to the next stage* (minimum criteria above).
We're happy to discuss any support/personalisation you may need during our application and selection process as part of our reasonable adjustments. Drop us a line if you require anything at talkingcareers@itv.com.
- There may be a few exceptions where we are not able to take all eligible candidates to the next stage due to the volume of applications.
Because those who make an impact deserve to be rewarded for it.
ITV offers some great rewards and benefits including
- Flexible working with a range of options
- Generous holiday allowance, plus you can buy more
- Annual bonus opportunity
- Competitive pension contribution
- Save as you earn - with an opportunity to buy ITV shares
- Wellbeing and volunteering days plus a wide range of opportunities to help you live a balanced and healthy life
More about our benefits