Lead Data Engineer

About Better Collective

Sports media at scale, running on data

Better Collective is a global sports media group, reaching more than 400 million monthly visits across a portfolio of leading sports media brands.

We build products and experiences that make sports more engaging and accessible for fans around the world. Behind that sits a large and diverse technology and data landscape, spanning markets, brands and business models.

We work in a collaborative environment where people are encouraged to challenge how things are done, take ownership and help shape what comes next.

The domain

Paid media is where the data has to pay off.

We spend real money across dozens of ad networks every day. Which campaigns scale, which creatives get cut, which markets get more budget: those calls come out of the models this team builds.

Ad platform spend and delivery, affiliate and operator revenue, CRM data, all stitched into one user-level view of what a click was actually worth. That model exists and it works.

It is also the most demanding domain on our data platform - the most sources, the fastest schema churn, and the shortest patience for a table that landed late.

We are looking for the engineer who owns it.

Where this role sits

A central platform team sets the how. You set the what.

Better Collective runs a hub and spoke data organisation. A central data platform team owns the platform itself - MotherDuck, dbt, Dagster, DLT, the golden paths, the standards, the infrastructure. Paid Media Insights is a domain team, a spoke, that builds on it.

The split is deliberate and we hold to it. The platform team decides how data is produced here. You decide what paid media produces, and you own everything we run.

So you are not starting a new stack, and you are not going to spend your year on plumbing that a central team should be solving once for everyone.

You are, however, expected to be a demanding customer. When a golden path does not fit paid media, we want you to say so and push for it to change, not quietly build around it.

You will report to the Senior Head of Paid Media Insights and work across Paid Media, with the Campaign, Commercial and CRM teams, as well as with the central platform team.

What you will own

Every data job in paid media. All of it.

Freshness, cost, reliability, alerting, and the incident at 07:30 before the spend review. If a paid media model is wrong or late, it is yours, not the platform team's. That accountability is the core of this role, not a footnote to it.

Concretely, you will own:

• The end-to-end user-level model. Ad platform spend and delivery, affiliate and operator revenue, and CRM, joined into one view the business trusts enough to move budget on.

• Ingestion of paid media sources, built on the platform's framework. Which sources, which schemas, and what happens the next time a network changes its API without telling anyone.

• The domain's models, from staging through to the marts analysts and business teams actually query, plus the semantic meaning that sits on top of them. Nobody at the centre can define what a qualified signup means in paid media. You can.

• Reverse ETL back into the ad platforms, so online and offline conversion data lands where it changes bidding.

• The handover. Part of your first year is taking over the paid media jobs the central team still runs on our behalf, and moving that ownership to where the context actually lives.

What you will lead

A group of engineers, and the standard they build to

You will guide and mentor a group of data engineers in Paid Media Insights, as their technical lead. That means setting the standard for how this domain builds, reviewing their work, unblocking them, and deliberately growing them: giving away the interesting problems rather than keeping them.

You will also shape the domain's roadmap together with the Senior Head of Paid Media Insights, the analysts and the business teams, and you will represent paid media in platform conversations, including how we support machine learning and data science on top of this data.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a step away from building. You will be in the code.