Head of Data Engineering

Job Introduction

Job Title: Head of Data Engineering

Company: Twinkl

Location: Fully flexible - remote, hybrid or office-based

Annual Salary: Up to £120k

Contract: Permanent

Twinkl is on an exciting journey to redefine how we serve our global teaching community through data. We're building a world-class data engineering function to power the next generation of our data platform, with modern tools and practices at our core.

 As Head of Data Engineering, you’ll manage our existing engineers and build the team further so that it can develop our data platform of the future. You'll design and implement robust data systems that power our analytics and operational needs, working across our entire data platform, from batch processing to real-time event streams, ensuring our solutions are scalable, maintainable, and deliver real value to our users.

You'll have the opportunity to design and implement a data platform that drives the further growth of our already thriving business. The leadership team at Twinkl is highly ambitious and will challenge you to deliver the structured and monitored data that they need to take the business even further. You’ll also develop as a manager, by working with our existing team of strong engineers and developing the team culture with them.

You will:

• Manage and continue to build a high performing team of Engineers

• Develop an operating model for the team that balances building for the future with immediate business need

• Build a modern data platform that underpins the organisation’s use of data

• Design and optimize data models to enable a data-driven business from self-serve analytics to  machine learning 

• Own the architecture of our data platform

• Implement automated scoring to assure data quality and reliability

• Work closely with senior leadership across the business to solve their data problems

• Maintain legacy data platforms to ensure the business continues to run while delivering the future platform

• Ensure data is catalogued and documented

• Turn complex data problems into maintainable solutions

You should have:

• Experience managing high performing engineering teams and setting them up for success

• Ability to interface with the business and take their requirements to turn into project plans

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams and stakeholders.

• Strong experience with modern data engineering tools and practices

• Understanding of event-driven architectures

• Broad knowledge with cloud platforms and services - you’ll be primarily using AWS and Dagster

• Expert knowledge of data modelling and warehouse design

• Strong SQL, dbt & Python skills

• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code concepts

• Experience implementing data quality checks that matter

• Understanding of data lineage and metadata management

Most importantly, you should:

• Be curious about how things work and always looking to learn more

• Care about building reliable systems that make other people's jobs easier

• Understand that sometimes "boring" technology is the right choice

• Get satisfaction from cleaning up messy data problems

• Want to work somewhere where you can have real impact, not just maintain the status quo

Our Data Team Culture:

• We embrace modern data engineering practices and tools

• We champion learning and development

• We believe in empowering engineers to drive technical decisions

• We focus on impact and outcomes over process