Head of Data Engineering & Infrastructure, UK

Job Description

We are Multiverse, a tech scaleup with a social mission. We’re creating a diverse group of future leaders by building an outstanding alternative to university and corporate training, through the power of professional apprenticeships.

We’re one of the fastest-growing businesses in Europe and rapidly expanding in North America, working with over 500 clients including Facebook, KPMG, Morgan Stanley and the NHS. In June 2022, we broke the EdTech funding record (again!) by announcing our $220m Series D, making Multiverse the UK’s first ever EdTech unicorn.

Join us on our journey to democratising access to the best careers and learning opportunities.

The opportunity

As Head of Data Engineering & Infrastructure, you will be responsible for the technologies, people and processes that underpin our data pipeline, which ultimately serves and enables every part of our business. You will be the primary owner of this pipeline, optimising our current approach while also leading the design and implementation of our future data ecosystem.

This role will be within the Data & Insight team, reporting to the VP of Data & Insight. While this is a leadership role and you will manage a small team of Data & Infrastructure Engineers, it will also involve a lot of hands-on work. Our team culture is one where everyone gets involved in development tasks and leaders are expected to develop in-depth knowledge of our business, our data and the systems that underpin them. You will therefore need to be pragmatic, collaborative, innovative and tenacious, balancing hands-on technical development work with people, project & stakeholder management.

What you’ll focus on:

Data Pipeline

• Mastering, maintaining & optimising our current data pipeline - owning all underlying infrastructure, connectors, data modelling, transformation logic, database assets & related processes

• Iteratively designing, building & migrating towards our future data ecosystem, optimising for security, reliability, availability, performance, usability, accessibility, scalability & cost

• Owning & managing our technology stack & architecture - inc Cloud, ETL, Storage, Modelling, APIs - identifying & evaluating new technologies/approaches vs requirements

• Integrating key systems - including third party tools and in-house technologies built by Multiverse’s Engineering and Data Science teams - with our data pipeline

• Managing ongoing technological and processes change as our data pipeline evolves from its current to future state

Leadership

• Being a core member of our Data & Insight leadership team - owning data engineering & infrastructure decisions while also contributing towards broader decisions around data products, analytics, data science, solutions, systems etc

• Planning quarterly data engineering & infrastructure roadmap deliverables in line with Data & Insight team strategy and overarching business needs

• Coordinating weekly team activity, balancing prioritisation of quarterly roadmap deliverables against urgent tactical needs

• Managing & developing a small team (currently ~6 people) of technical specialists

• Introducing & recruiting new technical roles as required

• Establishing & maintaining solid data governance & secure data practices across the organisation

Collaboration

• Understanding Multiverse leaders’ business, functional & technical requirements and translating these into well architected, documented, secure data pipelines

• Liaising closely with other leaders within the Data & Insight team (e.g. Product, Analytics, Data Science) - including collaborative prioritisation, resourcing & data product development

• Building & maintaining strong relationship with Multiverse's Engineering team (which develops the online Platform used by our customers, candidates & apprentices) - including alignment on technologies, architecture, models, standards & practices

• Maintaining transparent lines of communication with Multiverse's Information Security & Data Privacy/Protection leaders - ensuring that all data technologies & associated processes are compliant with legal requirements & industry best practice

• Commissioning & overseeing projects/products delivered by external technical partners

What we’re looking for:

Required:

• 8+ years of relevant Data Engineering and/or Infrastructure experience

• 2+ years of relevant people leadership experience

• Proven track record of producing high quality data engineering & infrastructure deliverables within a fast paced, high growth environment

• Passion for understanding business needs, mastering business logic and translating both into sustainable ETL data pipelines

• Good understanding of how to balance strategic vs tactical decisions and when to make appropriate trade-offs

• Significant experience with AWS (inc EC2, Lambda, RDS, Fargate), ETL, Git, Continuous Integration/Delivery, Infrastructure as Code (ideally Terraform), Orchestration, Scripting, Containers, Feature Stores, APIs

• Experience of integrating with third party systems via APIs and other software interfaces in order to read and write data to/from databases

• Exceptional PostgreSQL & data modelling skills

• Strong working knowledge of Python, with experience with productionising data science models for use with enterprise applications

• Proven ability to inspire, motivate and develop a team of ambitious, high-performing technical specialists

• Experience of working in collaborative environments, interfacing with other technical/engineering teams as well as non-technical business partners

• Strong verbal & written communication skills, with proven ability to convey complex technical issues clearly & concisely for non-technical audiences

• Pragmatic, ‘can-do’ approach with a proven record of turning challenges into opportunities

• Meticulous attention to detail

• Commitment to Multiverse’s mission and values

Non-Required (But Desirable):

• Experience using Asana or similar to manage quarterly/ongoing deliverables

• Experience with Sagemaker or similar machine learning services

• Experience with Tableau and/or Alteryx

• Experience with Salesforce and/or Qualtrics APIs

• Working knowledge of Elixir and/or PHP

• Understanding of education/skills sector