Principal Engineer

Location: Waterloo, London, England, UK | Hybrid (1 day per week in office)

Who We Are 

At 8th Light, we bring life to the best ideas.

Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Chicago, we are a technology solutions provider that partners with organizations to solve meaningful challenges and drive sustainable growth. From early-stage startups to global enterprises, we work across industries to optimise our clients’ digital products through product strategy innovation, experiential design, AI solutions, and deep engineering expertise. 

Our commitment to quality means we deliver solutions we’re truly proud of, while our curiosity sparks innovation and breakthrough thinking. 8th Lights thrive in an environment that champions continuous education, fueling our growth through mentorship and hands-on work. We foster an open, collaborative culture grounded in honesty that builds trust, and believe true success is measured by the outcomes we create for our clients.

If this kind of work and our kind of people energizes you, you’ve found the right place. 

Who You Are

You’ve shown long-term repeated success on a variety of projects, typically over the course of 10+ years. You are a trusted expert and leader, often called upon to guide ambiguous initiatives and architect scalable solutions. You bring a blend of deep consulting acumen, technical expertise, and product thinking that drives measurable and impactful outcomes. In your previous experience, you have:

• Demonstrated long-term success on high-stakes consulting engagements across multiple language paradigms, stacks, ecosystems, technical environments, and client industries 
• Built high-quality, maintainable software collaboratively, incrementally, and through an approach tailored towards the unique needs of the clients you’ve served 
• Led the development and delivery of production-grade software using a variety of languages and frameworks, including but not limited to: Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Ruby, Scala, R, SQL, and Go
• Evaluated and strategically applied AI-assistive development tools to accelerate delivery and improve quality
• A track record of understanding, assessing, and embracing new tooling and trends within the software industry
• Experience building or integrating AI/ML-powered features into products or systems (e.g., recommendation engines, NLP models, computer vision, predictive analytics) 
• Used context-appropriate automated testing to inform software design choices and catch bugs
• Successfully led modernization efforts to align legacy systems with short and long-term business needs
• Remedied architecture-level concerns such as scalability, security, reliability, and performance
• Facilitated alignment and collaboration across technical and non-technical stakeholders to move initiatives forward in the face of ambiguity and complexity while balancing technical considerations with product and user needs
• Provided mentorship and team support at scale, while sharing knowledge and improving team practices 
• Actively sought out and effectively given feedback
• Collaboratively led stakeholders to balance technical considerations with product and user needs

What You’ll Do At 8th Light

As a go-to technologist and strategist within 8th Light, you’ll work with a variety of clients, typically one to two in a year, while continuing to deepen your and our collective domain expertise over the course of your career with us. You’ll be responsible for:

• Rapidly building trust with clients, demonstrating technical expertise and understanding of their domain and objectives 
• Guiding technical direction, solving complex problems, and demonstrating best practices while remaining deeply engaged within the codebase
• Working pragmatically to balance technology choices while delivering high-quality work within deadlines
• Advising clients on architecture, scalability and platform evolution, connecting technical decisions to product and business outcomes
• Collaborating on systems that involve the full ML lifecycle from data ingestion and preprocessing, to model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring
• Driving innovation by proactively surfacing new technical approaches and product solutions
• Leading or initiating formal feedback conversations with teams and clients via retrospectives
• Clearly articulating and documenting outcomes and driving forward action items
• Contributing to the health of your team and 8th Light’s culture by modelling our Values
• Designing and managing high-level technical roadmaps for large engagements
• Building your network and maintaining relationships with clients and other industry leaders within your domain
• Coaching client engineering teams, transferring knowledge and leveling up practices
• Influencing client CTOs and executive decisions. Planning and execute technical work that involves stakeholders outside of project boundaries such as across a client's technical organization
• Participating in account planning; opportunity identification.
• Facilitating retrospectives, strategy sessions, and technical deep-dives to improve team and project outcomes
• Identifying, mitigating, and resolving blockers to team progress
• Contributing to 8th Light by serving as a mentor, leading or designing workshops internally or for clients, representing 8th Light in the tech community, or supporting our hiring processes
• Demonstrating leadership in scalable system design, modular architecture, and platform- or product-oriented development.
• Bringing depth in testing strategies, observability, fault tolerance, and secure engineering practices.
• Applying architectural patterns to evaluate tradeoffs and drive clear, documented design rationale.

Strongly Preferred Skills

We work across many areas, and encourage anyone with the experience listed above to apply. We would particularly like to encourage applicants with experience in the following areas:

• Delivering and advising on enterprise-grade AI systems, including RAG pipelines, vector search, and agentic frameworks (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, Crew AI, AutoGen, n8n), ensuring scalable, production-ready solutions that empower developers and align with business outcomes.
• DevSecOps & DevOps
• MLOps
• Infrastructure as Code
• Data Engineering: including platforms like Databricks for data processing and analytics.

Building a truly diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace is an ongoing journey, and we’re excited to keep learning and growing together. We have a proud tradition of hiring talented colleagues with real-world career experiences. 

How You’ll be Supported

At 8th Light, we believe our people are our greatest asset. Their growth, well-being, and success shape our future. 

• Our wellness package is designed with the Whole YOU in mind and includes:
• A robust L&D programme featuring unlimited access to thousands of books, courses, and expert-led training on the O'Reilly learning platform.
• Annual financial stipend and time allotment for learning & development
• Coworking support for our global team
• 12 weeks of new parent leave available for eligible employees

See our full list of Benefits. 

A Note on Compensation

At 8th Light, we are committed to a compensation philosophy that is transparent, fair, and helps us attract and retain top talent in alignment with our company’s strategic growth goals and clients’ needs.

We benchmark our salaries using Geographic Structures to establish competitive pay ranges within the regions where 8th Lights live. Our pay ranges for our Principal Engineer position within London is: £92-818-£116-122 GBP

Reach out to recruiting@8thlight.com for more relevant information pertaining to your local market.

8th Light Hubs and Geographies

8th Light's culture is rooted in strong connections that extend across our teams, regions, and beyond client work. We are a distributed team across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, with hubs in Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle. 

• London Co-working: Employees working from our London hub follow a hybrid model, which includes a minimum of one day per week in our Waterloo Office. This co-working day is designed to encourage collaboration and further strengthen our community.In most cases, our consulting engagements do not require travel.

We hope to see you apply! 

^#LI-Hybrid

As part of the Data Infrastructure team you will be supporting mission critical big data platforms, to ensure they are fully performant, reliable, available and secure. We call it data infrastructure engineering, also known as DataOps or Database Administration or SRE.

The role is a mixture of development of tooling and operational support for our platforms, two aspects that go hand-in-hand. It requires attention to detail and curiousity about how the systems work under the hood, and gives you a wide base of skills from low level system tuning to general coding. 

We manage four main storage platforms, namely:

• Apache Solr (~2.2 PB)
• Apache HBase (~450 TB)
• PostgreSQL (~15 TB)
• Kafka (~60 TB)

These platforms are all open source, written in Java, Scala or C, and we maintain in-house builds and patching of them. We use a variety of open-source and in-house developed tooling to manage these services, mostly written in Rust and Python, which run primarily on hundreds of servers in multiple data centres and in the cloud.

We maintain a balance between project work and operational/ad-hoc work for all members in the team, whether they are senior or recent graduates, and your day-to-day work will be a mix of these.

The exact project work will depend on your experience, but we will scope it out collectively to ensure it is both achievable and delivers benefit. Some example projects given to recent graduates are:

• Coding mapreduce jobs to validate data between two multi-TB+ hbase clusters (to run in hours rather than months)
• Building out a python code stack to transparently migrate production clients between clusters (without losing any data or requiring any downtime)
• Building and testing new HBase builds and deploying them live (without putting everyone in Brandwatch out of a job)
• Creating a platform for rolling out our data management systems using Apache Airflow (to stop people re-writing custom job management systems)
• Rolling out a DR solution for hadoop on AWS (while keeping the system performant and not bankrupting the company)

If you're joining the team as a graduate engineer we'll be focusing on developing your knowledge of the storage platforms, how to program against them and how to troubleshoot issues. The aim is that you'd be able to help with the staging support by 3-6 months, and join the rest of the team supporting the production systems in 12 months. You'll also be expected to take a full part in the life of the team and, as your experience grows, start designing the infrastructure we run.

This role is based in Brighton, UK, but working remotely will be possible once the initial 6-12 months of training is complete.

Who we are looking for

In house training for the storage systems and our tooling is a necessary part of this role, but we are looking for someone with a keen interest in large scale storage infrastructure.A successful candidate will be expected to have the following:

• An interest in how computer infrastructure actually works, and a passion for learning
• Interest, and ideally production experience, running storage systems, eg. as part of a selfhosted service, a home lab or as part of academic studies
• Experience with Linux systems administration, including experience of trouble shooting
• Fluency with one or more scripting languages, ideally Bash or Python
• Experience helping your peers
• Pride in the quality of your work
• Experience with any of the following will be beneficial:
  • Development experience, in Python, Java, Rust, C/C++ or Golang.
  • Upstream open-source contributions
  • Academic research in scalability, distributed systems or storage infrastructure
  • Kubernetes experience, ideally running or writing Operators Experience with Docker and with CI/CD pipelines

See yourself at Twilio

Join the team as Twilio’s next Senior Software Engineer.

About the job

This position is needed to deliver the best-in-class Twilio SDK experience for our customers.

Twilio’s SDK engineering team builds robust, powerful SDKs and a GraphQL layer to enable developers build their own Contact Center UIs and real-time AI Contact Center products. Many other teams rely on integrating and exposing their services via the Unified SDK layer to deliver their advanced features to our customers. The position is especially critical in supporting Twilio’s expansion and will be central to creating a core product that provides leverage to all of Twilio’s Flex Contact Center and engineering teams!

Responsibilities

In this role, you’ll:

• Design, build, and maintain large-scale backend services with a focus on reliability, availability, scalability, and performance.
• Lead technical design efforts and ensure architecture decisions are well-documented and future-proof.
• Collaborate closely with senior engineers, product managers, and cross-functional stakeholders.
• Champion high-quality engineering practices, including automated testing, maintainable code, and thorough documentation.
• Own and continuously improve Twilio’s developer experience for SDK customers.
• Support customers by troubleshooting issues and promoting backend and SDK best practices.
• Contribute to operational excellence by maintaining a high reliability bar and participating in incident response and system improvements.

Qualifications 

Twilio values diverse experiences from all kinds of industries, and we encourage everyone who meets the required qualifications to apply. If your career is just starting or hasn't followed a traditional path, don't let that stop you from considering Twilio. We are always looking for people who will bring something new to the table!

*Required:

• Bachelor’s/Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 5+ years of experience building and operating cloud-scale backend systems.
• Strong programming skills in backend languages such as Java or Scala.
• Experience authoring technical specifications and delivering end-to-end system designs.
• Strong fundamentals in concurrency and distributed systems.
• Experience working with AWS or other cloud platforms at scale.
• Proven ability to maintain a high operational excellence bar and mentor junior engineers on reliability and maintainability.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to thrive in collaborative, fast-moving teams.

Desired:

• Excellent problem-solving and critical thinking skills.
• Any prior experience building SDKs and GraphQL BFF layer is an added advantage.
• Ability to establish backend engineering guidelines and represent the team within the broader Twilio engineering organization.
• Passion for delivering high-quality products and continuously learning new technologies.
• Strong sense of ownership and accountability.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity and driving clarity in evolving environments.

Location

This role will be remote and based in the UK

Travel 

We prioritize connection and opportunities to build relationships with our customers and each other. For this role, you may be required to travel occasionally to participate in project or team in-person meetings.

What We Offer

Working at Twilio offers many benefits, including competitive pay, generous time off, ample parental and wellness leave, healthcare, a retirement savings program, and much more. Offerings vary by location.

Soho, London

Hybrid working: 3 days in the office Tues - Thurs

The Role

We are seeking a Data Engineer to join our Data Team, playing a vital part in building the complex, scalable systems that power our data strategy. You will be at the heart of architectural discussions, influencing system design and delivering the high-quality data solutions that bring millions of fans closer to the sports they love. This is a fantastic opportunity to tackle the challenge of optimising our data platforms for real-time AI/ML workloads, mentor talented junior engineers, and make a significant impact on our business. 

At LiveScore Group, we’re the proud home of three of the most exciting brands in the sports and gaming world: LiveScore, LiveScore Bet and Virgin Bet. A fully owned and operated ecosystem that converges the two worlds of sports media and sports betting. We’re proud of the high ratings for our commitment to excellence and fueling fan’s passion for sport driving us to the top.

We don’t just lead; we innovate. Our cutting-edge products and immersive experiences set the standard, but it’s our people who truly make the difference. Every day, our team embody our values: adaptability, teamwork, a fan-driven approach, and an ever-curious mindset that fuels our ambition. As we scale and continue to create a culture that allows all employees to thrive, we know we need the most talented people with diverse backgrounds, perspectives and skills. If you’re good at what you do, come and join us. The more inclusive we are, the more amazing experiences we can create for our users.

We know that job descriptions can sometimes seem daunting, and you might not feel you tick every box. But, if you’re passionate about the role and have relevant experience, we want to hear from you! 

Key Responsibilities 

• Contribute significantly to critical system design decisions, helping to architect data solutions that support real-time workloads.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to translate intricate business needs into effective and innovative data solutions.
• Mentor and provide expert technical guidance to junior engineers, fostering a culture of continuous learning and growth.
• Design data systems to solve problems and improve reliability & cost-effectiveness. 
• Develop and maintain robust, secure integrations with core internal systems and critical third-party platforms. 
• Implement advanced monitoring and alerting, to ensure high system reliability and minimal downtime. 

Skills, Knowledge and Experience 

• You have expert-level proficiency in a core programming language like Python, Java, or Scala, with an emphasis on AI/ML data processing.
• You possess experience with cloud data services and technologies, ideally within the GCP ecosystem (e.g., Dataflow, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Vertex AI).
• Experience with Airflow environment management and Docker 
• You can clearly and concisely explain intricate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• You have extensive experience designing and optimising both real-time and large-scale batch data processing frameworks.
• You have a proven ability to deploy and maintain data infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) principles with tools like Terraform.
• You can demonstrate the application of data governance, privacy, and security best practices in a regulated environment.
• You are a proactive and curious problem-solver, skilled in anticipating and resolving system inefficiencies.
• You work seamlessly with cross-functional teams, translating complex requirements into robust data solutions.
• You take full responsibility for the quality, reliability, and performance of the data solutions you help create. 

What can we offer? 

• Fridays Off: Say goodbye to Friday meetings and hello to a three-day weekend! This benefit is part of a trial, to be reviewed in 2026
• Company Performance Bonus
• Flexible Working Agreements where applicable
• Private Healthcare Scheme + Employee Enhanced Assistance
• Enhanced Family Leave - Maternity, Shared Parental & Adoption Leave: up to 6 months at full pay and 6 months at half pay. Paternity leave: up to 4 weeks at full pay
• Subsidised Gym Membership
• Annual Travel Card Loan & Ride to Work Scheme
• Life Assurance (x3 salary)
• Contributory Pension Plan
• Virgin Family: Giving you access to exclusive Virgin offers and experiences
• Thursday drinks in the office and regular socials

Senior Engineer

Location: Waterloo, London, England, UK | Hybrid (1 day per week in office)

Who We Are 

At 8th Light, we bring life to the best ideas.

Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Chicago, we are a technology solutions provider that partners with organizations to solve meaningful challenges and drive sustainable growth. From early-stage startups to global enterprises, we work across industries to optimise our clients’ digital products through product strategy innovation, experiential design, AI solutions, and deep engineering expertise. 

Our commitment to quality means we deliver solutions we’re truly proud of, while our curiosity sparks innovation and breakthrough thinking. 8th Lights thrive in an environment that champions continuous education, fueling our growth through mentorship and hands-on work. We foster an open and collaborative culture grounded in honesty that builds trust, and believe true success is measured by the outcomes we create for our clients.

If this kind of work and our kind of people energizes you, you’ve found the right place. 

Who You Are

You’ve shown repeated success on a variety of projects, typically over the course of 4+ years. You have a broad range of expertise that allows you to make an immediate impact on projects. In your previous experience, you have:

• Successfully contributed to high-stakes consulting engagements from discovery to production 
• Written production-quality code using a variety of languages and frameworks, that include: Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Ruby, Scala, R, SQL, and Go
• Built high-quality, maintainable software collaboratively, incrementally, and through an approach tailored towards the unique needs of the clients you’ve served 
• Leveraged AI-assistive development tools for tasks like scaffolding, refactoring, debugging, test generation, and documentation, where appropriate
• Experience building or integrating AI/ML-powered features into products or systems (e.g., recommendation engines, NLP models, computer vision, predictive analytics) 
• Used context-appropriate automated testing to inform software design choices and catch bugs
• Debugged and refactored pre-existing code to incrementally improve it
• Collaborated with teams using Git, MacOS/Linux, and CI/CD
• Remedied architecture-level concerns such as scalability, security, reliability, and performance
• Contributed to forums that encourage idea sharing, collaboration, and problem solving
• Made thoughtful recommendations and set direction in the face of ambiguity
• Mentored and shared knowledge with colleagues
• Actively sought out and effectively given feedback
• Communicated empathically with stakeholders and colleagues
• Influenced stakeholders to balance technical considerations with product and user needs

What You’ll Do At 8th Light

As a senior technologist on projects, you’ll work with a variety of clients, typically one to two in a year, through a variety of technologies and frameworks over the course of your career with us. You’ll work with colleagues who share your passion for technology solutions. You’ll invest time developing your skills and sharing what you know. You’ll be responsible for:

• Making immediate contributions to projects, rapidly building trust with your clients and team
• Working pragmatically to balance technology choices while delivering high-quality work within deadlines
• Contributing to architecture and software design discussions
• Collaborating on systems that involve the full ML lifecycle from data ingestion and preprocessing, to model deployment, integration, and performance monitoring
• Generating new potential solutions to challenges (technical and non-technical) in partnership with team members and clients
• Contributing to formal feedback conversations with teams and clients via retrospectives
• Clearly articulating and documenting outcomes and driving forward action items
• Regular syncs with your delivery team to provide status updates, and for identifying and evaluating risks and presenting potential solutions
• Identifying, mitigating, and resolving blockers to team progress
• Pursuing opportunities to further your skills to grow your career and keep pace with the rapid changes within the technology industry 
• Contributing to your team culture by building connections with your fellow 8th Lights, showing up on camera, and leveraging collaboration opportunities, such as coworking spaces and local team gatherings, where appropriate

Strongly Preferred Skills

We work across many areas, and encourage anyone with the experience listed above to apply. We would particularly like to encourage applicants with experience in the following areas:

• MLOps: including tools like LangChain for application development and managing the ML lifecycle
• Data Engineering: including platforms like Databricks for data processing and analytics
• DevSecOps & DevOps
• Infrastructure as Code

Building a truly diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace is an ongoing journey, and we’re excited to keep learning and growing together. We have a proud tradition of hiring talented colleagues with real-world career experiences. 

How You’ll be Supported

At 8th Light, we believe our people are our greatest asset. Their growth, well-being, and success shape our future. 

Our wellness package is designed with the Whole YOU in mind and includes:

• A robust L&D programme featuring unlimited access to thousands of books, courses, and expert-led training on the O'Reilly learning platform.
• Coworking support for our global team
• 12 weeks of new parent leave available for eligible employees
• Transparent semi-annual promotion panel

See our full list of Benefits. 

A Note on Compensation

At 8th Light, we are committed to a compensation philosophy that is transparent, fair, and helps us attract and retain top talent in alignment with our company’s strategic growth goals and clients’ needs.

We benchmark our salaries using Geographic Structures to establish competitive pay ranges within the regions where 8th Lights live. Our pay ranges for our Senior Engineer position within London is: £56,640-£70,800 GBP.

Reach out to recruiting@8thlight.com for more relevant information pertaining to your local market.

8th Light Hubs and Geographies

8th Light's culture is rooted in strong connections that extend across our teams, regions, and beyond client work. We are a distributed team across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, with hubs in Chicago, London, Los Angeles, New York, and Seattle. 

• London Co-working: Employees working from our London hub follow a hybrid model, which includes a minimum of one day per week in our Waterloo Office. This co-working day is designed to encourage collaboration and further strengthen our community.In most cases, our consulting engagements do not require travel.

We hope to see you apply! 

_#LI-Hybrid

What Is The Role:

As part of the Platform Engineering department, the Traffic team is crafting, building, and improving the multi-cloud platform at scale for Elastic Cloud Hosted and Serverless. We grow and mature our distributed network services and solutions for multiple cloud service provider platforms. We are built on Kubernetes, Go/Scala, and custom orchestration architectures. In your daily life with us, you will participate in coding, innovating technical designs, crafting solutions, improving resilience, and prioritizing security, bug fixes, and features. For example, Debugging Azure Networking for Elastic Cloud Serverless is part of our efforts, and we want your experience to contribute to a truly exceptional customer experience!

What You Will Be Doing:

• Taking an engineering approach in leading technical initiatives for automating network engineering efforts to guarantee the reliability of the global Elastic infrastructure. .
• Growing our global Platform infrastructure to meet the increasing scaling demands by developing and maintaining software, codebases, tooling and automations.
• Collaborating in an environment with an inclusive approach, and focusing on operational perfection which uplifts others.
• Preventing repeated customer impact in response to major incidents and prioritised problem management. Our on call rotation is spread well, and we address complex customer concerns too.

What You Bring:

• 10+ years in Software Engineering with product success in delivering Cloud network solutions. You collaborate with engineers as an authority in identifying, implementing and delivering solutions. Experience in public cloud, Go and managed Kubernetes services is advantageous.
• Success and lessons of experiences from striving for 'progress not perfection' in the name of Platform reliability. We want to hear about your customer first approach in solving operational problems for both today and the future.
• Passion for developing solutions that involve inclusive communication methods to grow and strengthen partner and team relationships. Examples of working in distributed teams or working remotely is desirable.

Bonus Points:

You don't need to have all of these items, but these represent the types of work you will do as a Software Engineer at Elastic.

• You have designed and built a SaaS product in a public cloud ideally built using Infrastructure-as-Code tooling such as Crossplane or Terraform
• You have built Kubernetes-at-scale infrastructure, ideally across multiple cloud providers, and the vital automation to support it.
• You have written product features or functions in Golang or other programming languages.
• You have worked with containerized services (such as Docker.)
• You have proven results in leading and improving cross-team engineering initiatives.
• You have experience in system administration with professional skills in Linux on distributed systems at scale.
• You have diagnosed or designed, implemented and created solutions with the Elastic Stack.
• You are experienced in a self-organizing and sharing in a globally distributed team environment.
• You strengthen team members in bringing out the best of each other by uplifting others with coaching and mentoring.

Are you a Senior Data Engineer with a passion to build, support & maintain digital marketing solutions that offers real value? Are you interested in working with the largest global brands and complex challenges in the media analytics space? Then you might be the Senior Data Engineer we’re looking for!

What will your day look like?

As our new Senior Data Engineer, you will become part of our growing Data Insights and Science team. Here, you will employ new technologies across multiple cloud platforms to help successful brands reach their next level in 1:1 retargeting, communication, and CRM. More specifically, your tasks include:

• Identify, collect, and integrate data from various sources by building high-quality data pipelines and data models for analytics and business intelligence (BI) purposes.
• Develop and optimize code to enable pipelines at minimum cost and ease of maintenance.
• Build monitoring procedures & tools to ensure solid ETL flows and data quality.
• Design processes and tools to correct ETL incidents.
• Collaborate with CRM developers, data scientists, data analysts, and product owners to ensure the supplied data supports the business initiatives.
• Consult our data analytics teams to ensure best practices on the technical use of data are followed.
• Design data architectures and collaborate in data migrations in cloud environments. 

Who are you going to work with?

You will join a team of highly skilled Architects, Data Scientists, and Consultants who are passionate about unlocking insights from data through analytics. You will also get to work closely with experts from other Technology, Creative, and Client Teams.

What do you bring to the table?

As a person, you have a team player mindset and an open-minded attitude. You can communicate ideas and technical topics honestly and clearly – also to non-experts – while respecting the views of others on the team. You are eager to understand and find solutions, allowing you to quickly adapt to changing situations and come up with new ideas.

At the same time, you solve problems in an analytical and pragmatic manner.

Moreover, you have:

• Experience in data engineering, big data, business intelligence, or data science. 
• Experience in Spark, Python, Scala, or similar.
• Excellent SQL skills enabling large-scale data transformation and analysis.
• A comprehensive understanding of cloud data warehousing, data pipelines and data transformation (extract, transform, and load) processes and supporting technologies such as Google Dataflow, Looker, DBT, EMR, CI/CD Pipelines, Airflow DAGs, and other analytics tools.
• Experience with cloud-based data infrastructures (Ideally GCP, but AWS or Azure would also suffice)
• Programming experience in Javascript, Python, or similar.
• Expertise in managing databases, including performance tuning, backup, and recovery.
• Solid knowledge of data quality management best practices, including data profiling, data cleansing, and data validation
• Knowledge of strengths and limitations of visualization tools (e.g. PowerBI, Tableau, Looker, etc.) in terms of data modeling in the visualization tools.
• Understanding of versioning control tools like GitHub to changes related to dbt models and transformations, ensuring that changes are tracked, documented, and reviewed by the appropriate stakeholders.
• Knowledge of applying data governance principles, policies, and practices that ensure data accuracy, consistency, and security
• Knowledge of Kubernetes would be an advantage

Personal skills:

• Strong desire to contribute towards keeping data tidy and well-organized
• Ability to think critically, identify issues autonomously, and propose corrective actions.
• Build great relationships with your team and stakeholders

A leader in personalized customer experiences

VML MAP is a world-leading Centre of Excellence that helps businesses humanize the relationship between the brand and the customer through hyper personalization at scale, marketing automation and CRM. With the brain of a consultancy, the heart of an agency and the power of technology and data, we work with some of the world's most admired brands to help them on their transformation journey to becoming truly customer-centric. Together, we are 1000 + technology specialists, data scientists, strategic thinkers, consultants, operations experts, and creative minds from 55+ nationalities.

A global network

We are part of the global VML network that encompasses more than 30,000 employees across 150+ offices in 60+ markets, each contributing to a culture that values connection, belonging, and the power of differences. 

#LI-EMEA

Req ID: CSQ327R44

Location: Hybrid – London

We’re hiring for multiple roles within our Professional Services team. Depending on experience and scope, this position may be offered as Senior Solutions Consultant, Resident Solutions Architect, or Senior Resident Solutions Architect.

You may know this role as a Big Data Solutions Architect, Analytics Architect, Data Platform Architect, or Technical Consultant. The final title will align to your experience, technical depth, and customer-facing ownership.

As a Big Data Solutions Architect (Internal Title - Resident Solutions Architect) in our Professional Services team you will work with clients on short to medium-term customer engagements on their big data challenges using the Databricks platform. You will provide data engineering, data science, and cloud technology projects which require integrating with client systems, training, and other technical tasks to help customers to get most value out of their data. RSAs are billable and know how to complete projects according to specification with excellent customer service. You will report to the regional Manager/Lead.

The impact you will have:

• You will work on a variety of impactful customer technical projects which may include designing and building reference architectures, creating how-to's and productionalizing customer use cases
• Work with engagement managers to scope variety of  professional services work with input from the customer
• Guide strategic customers as they implement transformational big data projects, 3rd party migrations, including end-to-end design, build and deployment of industry-leading big data and AI applications
• Consult on architecture and design; bootstrap or implement customer projects which leads to a customers' successful understanding, evaluation and adoption of Databricks.
• Provide an escalated level of support for customer operational issues.
• You will work with the Databricks technical team, Project Manager, Architect and Customer team to ensure the technical components of the engagement are delivered to meet customer's needs.
• Work with Engineering and Databricks Customer Support to provide product and implementation feedback and to guide rapid resolution for engagement specific product and support issues.

What we look for:

• Extensive experience in data engineering, data platforms & analytics
• Comfortable writing code in either Python or Scala
• Working knowledge of two or more common Cloud ecosystems (AWS, Azure, GCP) with expertise in at least one
• Deep experience with distributed computing with Apache Spark™ and knowledge of Spark runtime internals
• Familiarity with CI/CD for production deployments
• Working knowledge of MLOps 
• Design and deployment of performant end-to-end data architectures
• Experience with technical project delivery - managing scope and timelines.
• Documentation and white-boarding skills.
• Experience working with clients and managing conflicts.
• Build skills in technical areas which support the deployment and integration of Databricks-based solutions to complete customer projects.
• Travel to customers 10% of the time
• [Preferred] Databricks Certification but not essential

FEQ227R178

At Databricks, we are on a mission to empower our customers to solve the world's toughest data problems by utilizing the the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. As a Delivery Solutions Architect (DSA), you will play an important role during this journey. You will collaborate with our sales and field engineering teams to accelerate the adoption and growth of the Databricks platform in your customers. You will also help ensure customer success by increasing focus and technical accountability to our most complex customers who need guidance to accelerate usage on Databricks workloads that they have already selected, helping them maximise the value they get of our platform and the return on investment.

This is a hybrid technical and commercial role. It is commercial in the sense that you will drive growth in your assigned customers and use cases through leading your customers' stakeholders, building executive relationships, orchestration of other focused/specialized teams within Databricks, and creating and driving plans and strategies for Databricks colleagues to build upon. This is in parallel to being technical, with expectations being that you become the post-sale technical lead across all Databricks products. This requires you to use your skills and technical credibility to engage and communicate at all levels with an organisation. You will report directly to a DSA Manager within the Field Engineering organization. 

The impact you will have:

• Engage with Solutions Architects to understand the full use case demand plan for prioritised customers
• Lead the post-technical win technical account strategy and execution plan for the majority of Databricks use cases within our most strategic accounts
• Be the accountable technical leader assigned to specific use cases and customer(s) across multiple selling teams and internal stakeholders, creating certainty from uncertainty and driving onboarding, enablement, success, go-live and healthy consumption of the workloads where the customer has made the decision to consume Databricks
• Be the first contact for any technical issues or questions related to production/go live status of agreed upon use cases within an account, oftentimes services multiple use cases within the largest and most complex organizations
• Leverage both Shared Services, User Education, Onboarding/Technical Services and Support resources, along with escalating to expert level technical experts to build the right tasks that are beyond your scope of activities or expertise
• Create, own and execute a point-of-view as to how key use cases can be accelerated into production, coordinating with Professional Services (PS) resources on the delivery of PS Engagement proposals
• Navigate Databricks Product and Engineering teams for new product Innovations, private previews and upgrade needs
• Develop an execution plan that covers all activities of all customer-facing technical roles and teams to cover the below work streams:
• Main use cases moving from ‘win’ to production
• Enablement / user growth plan
• Product adoption (strategy and activities to increase adoption of Databricks’ Lakehouse vision)
• Organic needs for current investment (e.g. cloud cost control, tuning & optimization)
• Executive and operational governance
• Provide internal and external updates - KPI reporting on the status of usage and customer health, covering investment status, important risks, product adoption and use case progression - to your Technical GM

What we look for:

• 5+ years of experience where you have been accountable for technical project / program delivery within the domain of Data and AI and where you can contribute to technical debate and design choices with customers
• Programming experience in Python, SQL or Scala 
• Experience in a customer-facing pre-sales, technical architecture, customer success, or consulting role
• Understanding of solution architecture related distributed data systems
• Understanding of how to attribute business value and outcomes to specific project deliverables
• Technical program, or project management including account, stakeholder and resource management accountability
• Experience resolving complex and important escalation with senior customer executives
• Experience conducting open-ended discovery workshops,  creating strategic roadmaps, conducting business analysis and managing delivery of complex programmes/projects
• Track record of overachievement against quota, Goals or similar objective targets
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent experience through work experience
• Can travel up to 30% when needed

SLSQ427R253

As a Partner Solutions Architect for Europe, you will work with the technical and sales team members who work directly with our customers. You will develop 'technical champions’ within our top Partners, providing enablement on technical matters related to the Databricks product. Working with our partners, you will help our customers achieve tangible, data-driven outcomes through our Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, enabling data teams to complete projects and integrate them into their enterprise Ecosystem. As a member of our team, you will exercise and develop expertise in those areas, using open source projects such as Apache Spark™, MLflow, and Delta Lake, and major public cloud infrastructure and services. the product. You will use this expertise to become a trusted advisor to C&SI partners.

The impact you will have:

• Provide partners with the level of enablement they need to assist their clients in evaluating and adopting Databricks, including hands-on Apache Spark™ programming and integration with the wider cloud ecosystem.

• Engage with the partner technical community by leading workshops, seminars, and meet-ups.

• You will be a big data analytics expert in architecture and design, and will share this knowledge with our partner network.

• Show expertise by producing creative technical solutions and blog posts.

What we look for:

• 8 years of customer-facing experience working with external clients or partners across a variety of industry markets

• Core strength in either data engineering or data science

• Experience demonstrating technical concepts, including presenting and whiteboarding

• Experience developing architectures within a public cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP)

• Hands-on experience in SQL, Python, Scala, or Java

• Expertise in at least one of the following:

• Data Engineering technologies (Ex, Apache Spark™, Hadoop, Kafka)

• Data Warehousing (Ex, SQL, OLTP/OLAP/DSS)

• Data Science and Machine Learning technologies (Ex, pandas, scikit-learn, HPO)

CSQ327R39

We’re hiring for multiple roles within our Professional Services team. Depending on experience and scope, this position may be offered as a Senior Solutions Consultant or a Resident Solutions Architect.

You may know this role as a Big Data Solutions Architect, Analytics Architect, Data Platform Architect, or Technical Consultant. The final title will align to your experience, technical depth, and customer-facing ownership.

As a Data Platform Solutions Architect (Internal Title - Resident Solutions Architect) on our Professional Services team for the Emerging Enterprise & Digital Natives business in EMEA, you will work with clients on short to medium-term customer engagements on their big data challenges using the Databricks platform. You will provide data engineering, data science, and cloud technology projects which require integrating with client systems, training, and other technical tasks to help customers to get most value out of their data. RSAs are billable and know how to complete projects according to specification with excellent customer service. You will report to the regional Manager/Lead.

The impact you will have:

• Drive high-impact customer projects: Design and build reference architectures, implement production use cases, and create “how-to” guides tailored to the unique needs of fast-moving Emerging Enterprise & Digital Native customers in EMEA.
• Collaborate on project scoping: Work closely with Engagement Managers and customers to define project scope, schedules, and deliverables for professional services engagements.
• Enable transformational initiatives: Guide strategic customers through their end-to-end big data journeys—migrating from legacy platforms and deploying industry-leading data and AI applications on the Databricks platform.
• Consult on architecture & design: Provide thought leadership on solution design and implementation strategies, ensuring customers can successfully evaluate and adopt Databricks.
• Offer advanced support: Serve as an escalation point for operational issues, collaborating with Databricks Support and Engineering to resolve challenges quickly.
• Align technical delivery: Partner with cross-functional Databricks teams (Technical, PM, Architecture, and Customer Success) to align on milestones, ensuring customer needs and deadlines are met.
• Amplify product feedback: Provide implementation insights to Databricks Product and Support teams, guiding rapid improvements in features and troubleshooting for customers.

What we look for:

• Extensive experience in data engineering, data platforms & analytics
• Comfortable writing code in either Python or Scala
• Working knowledge of two or more common Cloud ecosystems (AWS, Azure, GCP) with expertise in at least one
• Deep experience with distributed computing with Apache Spark™ and knowledge of Spark runtime internals
• Familiarity with CI/CD for production deployments
• Working knowledge of MLOps 
• Design and deployment of performant end-to-end data architectures
• Experience with technical project delivery - managing scope and timelines.
• Documentation and white-boarding skills.
• Experience working with clients and managing conflicts.
• Build skills in technical areas which support the deployment and integration of Databricks-based solutions to complete customer projects.
• Travel to customers 10% of the time
• [Preferred] Databricks Certification but not essential

REQ ID: FEQ127R254

Location: Hybrid – London

We’re hiring for multiple roles within our Professional Services team. Depending on experience and scope, this position may be offered as Senior Solutions Consultant, Resident Solutions Architect, or Senior Resident Solutions Architect.

You may know this role as a Big Data Solutions Architect, Analytics Architect, Data Platform Architect, or Technical Consultant. The final title will align to your experience, technical depth, and customer-facing ownership.

As a Big Data Solutions Architect (Internal Title - Resident Solutions Architect) in our Professional Services team you will work with clients on short to medium-term customer engagements on their big data challenges using the Databricks platform. You will provide data engineering, data science, and cloud technology projects which require integrating with client systems, training, and other technical tasks to help customers to get most value out of their data. RSAs are billable and know how to complete projects according to specification with excellent customer service. You will report to the regional Manager/Lead.

The impact you will have:

• You will work on a variety of impactful customer technical projects which may include designing and building reference architectures, creating how-to's and productionalizing customer use cases
• Work with engagement managers to scope variety of  professional services work with input from the customer
• Guide strategic customers as they implement transformational big data projects, 3rd party migrations, including end-to-end design, build and deployment of industry-leading big data and AI applications
• Consult on architecture and design; bootstrap or implement customer projects which leads to a customers' successful understanding, evaluation and adoption of Databricks.
• Provide an escalated level of support for customer operational issues.
• You will work with the Databricks technical team, Project Manager, Architect and Customer team to ensure the technical components of the engagement are delivered to meet customer's needs.
• Work with Engineering and Databricks Customer Support to provide product and implementation feedback and to guide rapid resolution for engagement specific product and support issues.

What we look for:

• Extensive experience in data engineering, data platforms & analytics
• Comfortable writing code in either Python or Scala
• Working knowledge of two or more common Cloud ecosystems (AWS, Azure, GCP) with expertise in at least one
• Deep experience with distributed computing with Apache Spark™ and knowledge of Spark runtime internals
• Familiarity with CI/CD for production deployments
• Working knowledge of MLOps 
• Design and deployment of performant end-to-end data architectures
• Experience with technical project delivery - managing scope and timelines.
• Documentation and white-boarding skills.
• Experience working with clients and managing conflicts.
• Build skills in technical areas which support the deployment and integration of Databricks-based solutions to complete customer projects.
• Travel to customers 10% of the time
• [Preferred] Databricks Certification but not essential

Req ID: CSQ127R149

Location: United Kingdom Remote with occasional travel to the London office and clients' sites.

We’re hiring for multiple roles within our Professional Services team. Depending on experience and scope, this position may be offered as Senior Solutions Consultant, Resident Solutions Architect, or Senior Resident Solutions Architect.

You may know this role as a Big Data Solutions Architect, Analytics Architect, Data Platform Architect, or Technical Consultant. The final title will align to your experience, technical depth, and customer-facing ownership.

As a Resident Solutions Architect in our Professional Services team you will work with clients on short to medium-term customer engagements on their big data challenges using the Databricks platform. You will provide data engineering, data science, and cloud technology projects which require integrating with client systems, training, and other technical tasks to help customers to get most value out of their data. RSAs are billable and know how to complete projects according to specification with excellent customer service. You will report to the regional Manager/Lead.

The impact you will have:

• You will work on a variety of impactful customer technical projects which may include designing and building reference architectures, creating how-to's and productionalizing customer use cases
• Work with engagement managers to scope variety of  professional services work with input from the customer
• Guide strategic customers as they implement transformational big data projects, 3rd party migrations, including end-to-end design, build and deployment of industry-leading big data and AI applications
• Consult on architecture and design; bootstrap or implement customer projects which leads to a customers' successful understanding, evaluation and adoption of Databricks.
• Provide an escalated level of support for customer operational issues.
• You will work with the Databricks technical team, Project Manager, Architect and Customer team to ensure the technical components of the engagement are delivered to meet customer's needs.
• Work with Engineering and Databricks Customer Support to provide product and implementation feedback and to guide rapid resolution for engagement specific product and support issues.

What we look for:

• Extensive experience in data engineering, data platforms & analytics
• Comfortable writing code in either Python or Scala
• Working knowledge of two or more common Cloud ecosystems (AWS, Azure, GCP) with expertise in at least one
• Deep experience with distributed computing with Apache Spark™ and knowledge of Spark runtime internals
• Familiarity with CI/CD for production deployments
• Working knowledge of MLOps 
• Design and deployment of performant end-to-end data architectures
• Experience with technical project delivery - managing scope and timelines.
• Documentation and white-boarding skills.
• Experience working with clients and managing conflicts.
• Build skills in technical areas which support the deployment and integration of Databricks-based solutions to complete customer projects.
• Travel to customers 10% of the time
• [Preferred] Databricks Certification but not essential

P-1514

At Databricks, we are passionate about enabling data teams to solve the world's toughest problems — from making the next mode of transportation a reality to accelerating the development of medical breakthroughs. We do this by building and running the world's best data and AI infrastructure platform so our customers can use deep data insights to improve their business. Founded by engineers — and customer obsessed — we leap at every opportunity to tackle technical challenges, from designing next-gen UI/UX for interfacing with data to scaling our services and infrastructure across millions of virtual machines. And we're only getting started.

Founded by engineers, Databricks has started a multi-year journey to build the best Lakehouse Platform. For this we are building on top of a great foundation but our goal is to go further to build dramatically better products. We want to revisit every component to provide our customers with the fastest, easiest to use and most secure data platform for all their data workloads.

As a software engineer, you will join as a founding member of not only the London site, but really as a founding team for our multi-year journey to achieve our Lakehouse vision. You will be involved in the entire development cycle and exemplify all core Databricks values.

The impact you will have:

Our backend teams span many domains across our essential service platforms. For instance, you might work on challenges such as:

• Problems that span from product to infrastructure including: distributed systems, at-scale service architecture and monitoring, workflow orchestration, and developer experience.
• Build reliable, secure and high performance services and client libraries for storing and accessing humongous amount of data on cloud storage backends, e.g., AWS S3, GCS, Azure Blob Store.
• Develop product features that empower our customers to easily store and access their data.
• Solve reliability problems related to Lakebase.
• Actively find causes of downtime and systematically improve or remove root causes.
• Help the org define SLIs, meet SLOs, and drive long-term reliability improvements.

What we look for:

• BS degree (or higher) in Computer Science, or a related field.
• 8+ years of production level experience in one of: Java, Scala, C++, or similar language.
• Experience developing large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience working on a SaaS platform or with Service-Oriented Architectures.
• Knowledge of SQL.

FEQ127R211

At Databricks, we are on a mission to empower our customers to solve the world's toughest data problems by utilizing the the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. As a Senior Delivery Solutions Architect (DSA), you will play an important role during this journey. You will collaborate with our sales and field engineering teams to accelerate the adoption and growth of the Databricks platform in your customers. You will also help ensure customer success by increasing focus and technical accountability to our most complex customers who need guidance to accelerate usage on Databricks workloads that they have already selected, helping them maximise the value they get of our platform and the return on investment.

This is a hybrid technical and commercial role. It is commercial in the sense that you will drive growth in your assigned customers and use cases through leading your customers' stakeholders, building executive relationships, orchestration of other focused/specialized teams within Databricks, and creating and driving plans and strategies for Databricks colleagues to build upon. This is in parallel to being technical, with expectations being that you become the post-sale technical lead across all Databricks products. This requires you to use your skills and technical credibility to engage and communicate at all levels with an organisation. You will report directly to a DSA Manager within the Field Engineering organization. 

The impact you will have:

• Engage with Solutions Architects to understand the full use case demand plan for prioritised customers
• Lead the post-technical win technical account strategy and execution plan for the majority of Databricks use cases within our most strategic accounts
• Be the accountable technical leader assigned to specific use cases and customer(s) across multiple selling teams and internal stakeholders, creating certainty from uncertainty and driving onboarding, enablement, success, go-live and healthy consumption of the workloads where the customer has made the decision to consume Databricks
• Be the first contact for any technical issues or questions related to production/go live status of agreed upon use cases within an account, oftentimes services multiple use cases within the largest and most complex organizations
• Leverage both Shared Services, User Education, Onboarding/Technical Services and Support resources, along with escalating to expert level technical experts to build the right tasks that are beyond your scope of activities or expertise
• Create, own and execute a point-of-view as to how key use cases can be accelerated into production, coordinating with Professional Services (PS) resources on the delivery of PS Engagement proposals
• Navigate Databricks Product and Engineering teams for new product Innovations, private previews and upgrade needs
• Develop an execution plan that covers all activities of all customer-facing technical roles and teams to cover the below work streams:
• Main use cases moving from ‘win’ to production
• Enablement / user growth plan
• Product adoption (strategy and activities to increase adoption of Databricks’ Lakehouse vision)
• Organic needs for current investment (e.g. cloud cost control, tuning & optimization)
• Executive and operational governance
• Provide internal and external updates - KPI reporting on the status of usage and customer health, covering investment status, important risks, product adoption and use case progression - to your Technical GM

What we look for:

• 10+ years of experience where you have been accountable for technical project / program delivery within the domain of Data and AI and where you can contribute to technical debate and design choices with customers
• Programming experience in Python, SQL or Scala 
• Experience in a customer-facing pre-sales, technical architecture, customer success, or consulting role
• Understanding of solution architecture related distributed data systems
• Understanding of how to attribute business value and outcomes to specific project deliverables
• Technical program, or project management including account, stakeholder and resource management accountability
• Experience resolving complex and important escalation with senior customer executives
• Experience conducting open-ended discovery workshops,  creating strategic roadmaps, conducting business analysis and managing delivery of complex programmes/projects
• Track record of overachievement against quota, Goals or similar objective targets
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent experience through work experience
• Can travel up to 30% when needed

6841 - Director, Global Client Finance Data & Platform

About WPP Media 

WPP is the creative transformation company. We use the power of creativity to build better futures for our people, planet, clients and communities. For more information, visit wpp.com. 

WPP Media is WPP’s global media collective. In a world where media is everywhere and in everything, we bring the best platform, people, and partners together to create limitless opportunities for growth. For more information, visit wppmedia.com 

Role Summary and Impact 

The Director, Client Finance Data & Platform is the chief architect and owner of Abacus, our core Global Client Finance data ecosystem. This is a critical leadership role responsible for building and operating the reliable data pipelines, robust standards, and intuitive self-service interfaces that will transform our Global Client Financefunction. 

You will own the end-to-end data journey, from ingestion from source systems like SAP BFC, through transformation in Databricks, to the delivery of certified, user-friendly Power BI semantic models. Your mission is to operate a world-class data platform with rock-solid reliability, enabling the Global Client Finance team to move from manual data wrangling to high-impact strategic analysis. This role is perfect for a data expert who is passionate about building data products and thrives on bridging the gap between the technical and financial worlds. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Abacus Platform Ownership: Own the Abacus architecture and semantic layer. Design and govern the dimensional model (star schemas, dimensions, facts), set development standards, manage versioning, and run a predictable, agile release cadence for all data products. 

• Data Engineering & Pipelines: Lead the build and operation of robust, scalable, and automated ingestion pipelines for core sources (e.g., SAP BFC, Dynamics 365, Timesheet systems). Champion the use of reusable connectors, templates, and test suites to simplify and accelerate the onboarding of new data sources. 

• Data Governance & Contracts: Define and govern data connections with source system owners. Manage schema change control, ensure backward compatibility, and triage data quality issues. Publish and maintain clear API/feed documentation for all data integrations. 

• Power BI & Semantic Layer: Deliver and certify user-friendly Power BI semantic models and curated data marts that serve as the "single source of truth" for Global Client Finance reporting. Continuously optimize DAX query performance and manage access governance for our broad user base. 

• Data Quality & Reliability: Implement a framework for automated testing, data quality checks, and performance monitoring. Define and manage SLAs for all data products, and lead incident management and root-cause remediation to ensure the business has uninterrupted access to trusted data. 

• Enable AI-Powered Self-Service: Drive the strategy and implementation of AI/ML across the data platform. This includes not only developing models for forecasting and anomaly detection but also pioneering AI-driven interfaces (e.g., natural language querying) to truly democratize data access. Your goal is to empower non-technical users to explore and understand complex financial data intuitively, asking questions in plain language and getting immediate, reliable answers. 

• Strategic Partnership: Work in close partnership with the Global Business Systems (GBS) team, Master Data Management (MDM) projects, and WPP technology counterparts to ensure our data platform aligns with the broader enterprise technology landscape. 

Skills and Experience 

Core Tech Stack: 

• Data Platform: Expert-level knowledge of Databricks (Notebooks, Delta Lake, SQL endpoints). 

• ETL/ELT: Proven experience building and managing data pipelines using tools like Azure Data Factory, dbt, or similar. 

• BI & Semantic Layer: Deep expertise in Microsoft Power BI, including mastery of DAX, M (Power Query), dataflows, and performance tuning of large-scale semantic models. 

• Data Languages: Expert-level SQL is essential. Proficiency in Python and/or Scala is highly preferred. 

• Data Modeling: Deep expertise in dimensional modeling (Kimball methodology, star/snowflake schemas) and data warehousing principles. 

• Source Systems: Experience integrating data from financial consolidation systems (e.g., SAP BFC/Cartesis, Hyperion) and ERPs (e.g., SAP, Dynamics 365) is a significant advantage. 

• AI/ML & Advanced Analytics: Familiarity with machine learning concepts and their practical application for forecasting and anomaly detection is a strong plus. Crucially, an understanding of how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be applied to create natural language querying ("Text-to-SQL" or "Text-to-DAX") interfaces for data exploration and business intelligence is highly desirable. 

• DataOps/DevOps: Experience with CI/CD pipelines, source control (Git), and automated testing frameworks for data. 

Experience & Personal Attributes 

• Experience in data architecture, data engineering, or BI development, with at least 3-5 years in a technical leadership or platform ownership role. 

• Crucially, demonstrable experience working within or in very close partnership with a corporate Finance or FP&A function. You must be able to understand financial concepts and translate business requirements into robust technical solutions. 

• Proven track record of designing, building, and operating large-scale data platforms and BI solutions in a global enterprise environment. 

• Strategic thinker with the ability to see the big picture and define a long-term data roadmap, while also being hands-on and capable of diving deep into technical details. 

• Exceptional stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts to non-technical audiences, from junior analysts to C-suite executives. 

• A passion for data quality, governance, and building trust in data across an organization. 

Life at WPP Media & Benefits 

Our passion for shaping the next era of media includes investing in our employees to help them do their best work, and we’re just as committed to employee growth as we are to responsible media investment. WPP Media employees can tap into the global WPP Media & WPP networks to pursue their passions, grow their networks, and learn at the cutting edge of marketing and advertising. We have a variety of employee resource groups and host frequent in-office events showcasing team wins, sharing thought leadership, and celebrating holidays and milestone events. Our benefits include competitive medical, group retirement plans, vision, and dental insurance, significant paid time off, preferential partner discounts, and employee mental health awareness days.   

WPP Media is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without discrimination or regard to particular characteristics. We are committed to fostering a culture of respect in which everyone feels they belong and has the same opportunities to progress in their careers. 
 
We believe the best work happens when we're together, fostering creativity, collaboration, and connection. That's why we’ve adopted a hybrid approach, with teams in the office around four days a week. If you require accommodations or flexibility, please discuss this with the hiring team during the interview process. 

Please note this is a UK based role and requires individuals to have the right to work in this location 

Please read our Privacy Notice (https://www.wppmedia.com/pages/privacy-policy) for more information on how we process the information you provide. 

#LI-Promoted 

309 - Lead Architect, Cloud – Choreograph Consulting

About WPP Media

WPP is the creative transformation company. We use the power of creativity to build better futures for our people, planet, clients and communities. For more information, visit wpp.com.

WPP Media is WPP’s global media collective. In a world where media is everywhere and in everything, we bring the best platform, people, and partners together to create limitless opportunities for growth. For more information, visit wppmedia.com

About Choreograph: A Leading WPP Media Brand

Choreograph is WPP’s global data products and technology company. We’re on a mission to transform marketing by building the fastest, most connected data platform that bridges marketing strategy to scaled activation.

We work with agencies and clients to transform the value of data by bringing together technology, data and analytics capabilities. We deliver this through the Open Media Studio, an AI-enabled media and data platform for the next era of advertising.

We’re endlessly curious. Our team of thinkers, builders, creators and problem solvers are over 1,000 strong, across 20 markets around the world.

Role Summary and Impact

We are hiring a Lead Architect, Cloud to drive the technical delivery of Azure-based data engineering and cloud configuration engagements within client environments.

As the senior technical authority on the engagement, you will design, architect, and implement modern data platform solutions on Microsoft Azure, establish CI/CD practices, and guide engineers to follow reference architectures and standards.

You will sit within the Cloud Architecture team, partnering closely with Data Engineering, Platform/DevOps, Security, and Client Delivery to ensure designs translate into resilient, cost-effective and compliant implementations.

This role combines hands-on architecture with leadership of the technical approach, enabling consistent delivery quality across multiple client projects. You will mentor engineers, review designs and own key technical decisions and trade-offs.

Area of expertise

• Azure data platform architecture: Data Lake/Lakehouse patterns (ADLS Gen2, Delta Lake), Synapse Analytics, and/or Azure Databricks.
• Orchestration and integration using Azure Data Factory (pipelines, mapping/wrangling data flows, integration runtimes) and event-driven patterns (Event Hubs, Service Bus).
• CI/CD for data and infrastructure (Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions) including blue/green deployments, approvals and environment promotion.
• Infrastructure-as-Code using Bicep and/or Terraform; reusable modules, policy-as-code, and environment baselines.
• Secure-by-design cloud configuration: networking, private endpoints, managed identities, Key Vault, RBAC, Purview governance, data masking.
• Data engineering practices: batch and streaming pipelines, data quality testing, schema management, and performance optimization (Spark/Synapse SQL).
• Observability and operations: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Application Insights, cost/performance telemetry, and SLAs/SLOs for pipelines.
• Azure Well-Architected Framework alignment (reliability, security, cost, performance, operations) and FinOps-aware design.
• API and integration design with Azure Functions, Logic Apps, and API Management for data services.

Skills and Experience

At WPP Media, we believe in the power of our culture and our people. It’s what elevates us to deliver exceptional experiences for both our clients and each other. In this role it will be critical to embrace WPP & WPP Media’s shared core values:

• Be Extraordinary by Leading Collectively to Inspire transformational Creativity.
• Create an Open environment by Balancing People and Client Experiences by Cultivating Trust.
• Lead Optimistically by Championing Growth and Development to Mobilize the Enterprise.

• Hands-on architect who sets clear reference architectures and patterns, then leads by example through implementation and code reviews.
• Designs for operability, security, and cost from the start; makes pragmatic trade-offs and documents decisions.
• Automates everything possible with IaC and CI/CD; favors repeatability over one-off builds.
• Clear communicator who can facilitate client workshops, write concise design docs/runbooks, and align cross-functional teams.
• Inclusive leader who mentors engineers, invites diverse viewpoints, and creates shared ownership of outcomes.
• Outcome-focused: measures success with deployment frequency, lead time for changes, data pipeline SLAs, cost efficiency, and reliability metrics.
• Consultative and client-facing, able to translate business requirements into technical roadmaps and phased delivery.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture and end-to-end delivery of Azure data platforms for clients, including landing zones, networking, identity, and data platform services (Azure Data Lake Storage, Synapse, Databricks).
• Design and implement Azure Data Factory pipelines and data flows for ingestion, transformation, and orchestration; establish patterns for parameterization, retries, and error handling to meet pipeline SLAs.
• Establish CI/CD for data and infrastructure (Azure DevOps/GitHub): repo strategy, branching, pull requests, multi-stage pipelines, approvals, environment promotion, and artifact/versioning strategy.
• Define and deliver infrastructure-as-code using Bicep and/or Terraform; create reusable modules and policy-as-code guardrails to ensure consistent, compliant environments.
• Implement secure-by-default configurations: private endpoints, managed identities, Key Vault-backed secrets, RBAC, network isolation, data encryption, and Purview cataloging/lineage.
• Optimize performance and cost across compute and storage (e.g., Spark cluster sizing, autoscaling, partitioning, caching, lifecycle policies, serverless options); track and report savings.
• Introduce DataOps practices: automated testing (unit/integration), data quality checks, schema enforcement, and promotion gates; reduce change failure rate and improve lead time.
• Define monitoring and observability for pipelines and platforms using Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, and custom metrics; design alerting that drives fast MTTR.
• Guide the design of streaming and micro-batch patterns (Event Hubs, Kafka on Azure, Structured Streaming) where required by the use case.
• Partner with Security and Platform teams to align with Azure Well-Architected, landing zone standards, and compliance requirements (e.g., GDPR data controls); support audit-ready documentation.
• Lead technical workshops, produce architecture diagrams, HLDs/LLDs, and runbooks; present designs at client design authorities and steer technical decision-making.
• Provide technical leadership to engineering teams: mentor, review code/IaC, unblock delivery, and ensure adherence to reference architecture and non-functional requirements.
• Plan phased roadmaps and migration paths from legacy platforms; de-risk cutovers through rehearsal and roll-back strategies.
• Contribute to internal accelerators, templates, and best practices that raise delivery consistency across engagements.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience in cloud data engineering/architecture with a focus on Microsoft Azure.
• Proven leadership as a lead/principal engineer or architect delivering Azure data platforms in client environments.
• Expertise with Azure Data Factory (pipelines, data flows, integration runtimes) and at least one of Synapse Analytics or Azure Databricks (Spark).
• Strong CI/CD experience using Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions for both IaC and data workloads; environment strategy, approvals, and automated testing.
• Proficiency in Infrastructure-as-Code with Bicep and/or Terraform; reusable modules and policy enforcement (Azure Policy).
• Solid data engineering fundamentals: SQL and one of Python/Scala; performance tuning for Spark/Synapse; data modeling for analytical workloads.
• Secure Azure configuration: VNets, private endpoints, managed identities, Key Vault, RBAC; understanding of Purview governance and data protection patterns.
• Observability and operations experience: Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, alerting, pipeline SLAs, and incident playbooks.
• Excellent client-facing communication, architecture documentation, and stakeholder management skills.
• Nice-to-have
• Event-driven architectures with Event Hubs, Kafka, Stream Analytics, or Functions; CDC patterns (e.g., ADF, Debezium).
• Lakehouse/Delta patterns on Databricks; MLflow and feature store awareness; Synapse/Dedicated SQL Pools performance optimization.
• Data quality tooling and frameworks (Great Expectations, Deequ) and dbt for transformation governance.
• FinOps practices for Azure cost governance and tagging/chargeback models.
• API Management, Logic Apps, or Power Platform integration experience.
• Experience with Azure landing zones, Enterprise Scale architecture, and Azure Policy/Blueprints (or equivalent).
• Relevant certifications: Microsoft Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert, Azure Data Engineer Associate, or equivalent.

Life at WPP Media & Benefits

Our passion for shaping the next era of media includes investing in our employees to help them do their best work, and we’re just as committed to employee growth as we are to responsible media investment. WPP Media employees can tap into the global WPP Media & WPP networks to pursue their passions, grow their networks, and learn at the cutting edge of marketing and advertising. We have a variety of employee resource groups and host frequent in-office events showcasing team wins, sharing thought leadership, and celebrating holidays and milestone events. Our benefits include competitive medical, group retirement plans, vision, and dental insurance, significant paid time off, preferential partner discounts, and employee mental health awareness days.  

WPP Media is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without discrimination or regard to particular characteristics. We are committed to fostering a culture of respect in which everyone feels they belong and has the same opportunities to progress in their careers.

We believe the best work happens when we're together, fostering creativity, collaboration, and connection. That's why we’ve adopted a hybrid approach, with teams in the office around four days a week. If you require accommodations or flexibility, please discuss this with the hiring team during the interview process.

Please note this is a UK based role and requires individuals to have the right to work in this location

Please read our Privacy Notice (https://www.wppmedia.com/pages/privacy-policy) for more information on how we process the information you provide.

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