Senior Data Engineer 1 - Data Platform

Location: London office / Hybrid (2 days per week in the office)

Reporting to: Data Engineering Manager

The Role

Millions of people visit the Rightmove website every month. We have a huge amount of data about how people use the site, and what this means to our customers.

You’ll be joining our growing Data Engineering & Infrastructure team, a collaborative, high-performing group of engineers that uses this data to build the infrastructure that powers the UK’s favourite property site.

In this role, you will take ownership of the systems and infrastructure that ingest, process, and serve data across Rightmove. You will be responsible for the infrastructure, tooling, and engineering practices that power our data ecosystem, including data ingestion, orchestration, storage, and the developer experience for data producers and consumers.

You will bring strong hands-on expertise to our GCP-based data platform, design reusable patterns and tools, write robust Python and SQL, and deploy infrastructure with Terraform, while influencing the standards and technical decisions that the wider data engineering team works to.

As a Senior Data Engineer, you will be a technical leader and multiplier within the data platform team. You will own the infrastructure, frameworks, and internal tooling that power Rightmove’s data ecosystem. You will contribute to the technical direction for how data is ingested, processed, and served across the business, and consistently apply and promote engineering best practices that raise the quality of the team’s work.

Join an inclusive and collaborative engineering culture where you'll work alongside talented engineers, tackle complex technical challenges, and continue to grow your skills. You'll leverage a modern GCP stack and apply your data engineering expertise to build products and services used by millions across the UK every day.

A note from your future manager: "This role designs and builds the pipelines and infrastructure that keep our data flowing reliably, so every team can build with confidence and speed."

What You’ll Be Doing

• Define the technical approach to our most complex and ambiguous data challenges, setting direction where others would wait for clarity, making high-quality architectural decisions, and ensuring the right trade-offs are made for the long-term health of the platform
• Own the end-to-end technical leadership of cross-functional projects, from shaping requirements with product owners and domain teams through to delivery. Take accountability for outcomes, not just the engineering contribution
• Design and build data platform infrastructure and internal tooling, contributing to the architectural direction for how teams across Rightmove work with data
• Own the design and evolution of reusable batch and real-time data ingestion and processing frameworks, ensuring they are reliable, scalable, and serve the needs of teams across the business
• Manage infrastructure, security and code deployment with Terraform and CI/CD pipelines
• Optimise performance, scalability, and cost efficiency of our data platform
• Champion engineering best practices across the team, including testing, documentation, and observability, share knowledge and support others through code reviews and technical discussions, helping raise the bar and embed standards in how the team works
• Partner with engineers, data scientists, and analytics teams to enable self-service data workflows, acting as a technical enabler and setting the patterns others follow

We're Looking For Someone Who

• Has a strong track record of delivering significant impact in data engineering or data platform engineering, with deep experience building and operating large-scale, cloud-based data platforms
• Thrives in ambiguity, able to define the problem, identify the right technical approach, and drive complex cross-functional projects to completion without needing fully formed requirements
• Is a strong Python and SQL engineer, with mastery of software engineering fundamentals, and is able to raise the standard across the team
• Has deep, hands-on experience with GCP (or comparable cloud platforms) and managing infrastructure as code with Terraform, and can influence how the team approaches cloud engineering
• Has a strong track record of designing, building, and operating production-grade data pipelines and real-time processing frameworks at scale
• Has built and managed CI/CD pipelines for data and infrastructure, and can lead the team in adopting reliable, automated deployment practices
• Has a track record of raising the technical bar across the team through introducing better practices, leading technical reviews, and driving engineering improvements that outlast individual projects
• Has knowledge of GDPR and data security best practices
• Understands data storage, data modelling principles, best practices and tools (e.g. dbt)
• Communicates with clarity and confidence, able to lead design discussions, articulate technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders, and build alignment across teams
• Is curious, self-directed, and proactive, identifying problems before they are assigned, and drives improvements to the platform without being asked