Lead Data Engineer (Platform)

Why Valtech? We’re the experience innovation company - a trusted partner to the world’s most recognized brands. To our people we offer growth opportunities, a values -driven culture, international careers and the chance to shape the future of experience. The opportunity At Valtech, you’ll find an environment designed for continuous learning, meaningful impact, and professional growth. Whether you're pioneering new digital solutions, challenging conventional thinking or building the next generation of customer experiences, your work will help transform industries. We are proud of: The work we do and the innovation we drive Our values of share, care a nd dare A workplace culture that fosters creativity, diversity and autonomy Our borderless, global framework, which enables seamless collaboration The role As a Lead Data Engineer (Platform), you are passionate about engineering excellence, developer experience, and scalable data platforms. You bring strong technical expertise, a product mindset for platform engineering, and a drive to simplify and accelerate how engineering teams deliver data solutions. You will thrive in this role if you are: A platform-minded engineer who thinks in systems, not just pipelines A strong advocate for automation, standardisation and reusable engineering patterns Excited by improving developer experience across large engineering communities Comfortable balancing hands-on technical work with technical leadership and enablement Motivated by continuous improvement and eliminating manual engineering effort Role responsibilities Design, build, and maintain scalable data engineering frameworks and platform utilities used across engineering teams Develop reusable patterns, templates, and abstractions to standardise and accelerate delivery Define and evolve platform architecture decisions, ensuring scalability, maintainability and consistency Design and implement CI/CD pipelines and automation frameworks to improve engineering velocity Define and enforce engineering standards for testing, code quality, deployment and documentation Identify and eliminate manual or repetitive processes through automation and tooling improvements Integrate AI-assisted development tools into engineering workflows to improve productivity Develop and maintain AI engineering assets such as coding guidelines, prompt frameworks and reusable agent configurations Lead the development and operational support of core data transformation frameworks (including dbt Core at enterprise scale) Investigate and resolve framework-level issues, including deployment failures, dependency conflicts and production incidents Support onboarding and enablement of engineering teams adopting platform tooling Act as the main technical point of contact for platform and framework-related queries Partner with engineering teams to identify pain points and translate them into platform improvements Ensure platform tooling meets security, compliance and operational requirements Conduct and support code and design reviews across platform components Monitor platform health, performance and adoption, iterating based on feedback and metrics Contribute to documentation, developer guides and enablement materials to improve usability and adoption Must have qualifications To be considered for this role, you must meet the following essential qualifications: Strong proficiency in Python for building frameworks, automation tooling and reusable components Hands-on experience with Databricks (including notebooks, workflows, jobs and Unity Catalog) Strong SQL skills and experience with distributed processing frameworks such as Apache Spark Deep experience with dbt Core, including project structure, models, tests, macros and deployment at scale Proven experience designing and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps or GitLab CI) Experience with data engineering platform design, including scalable pipeline and workflow architectures Strong understanding of