Data Engineer

Working location: London, White City, hybrid 1-2 days in week.

Contract Type: Permanent

###

Role Overview

As a Data Engineer in the BDE team, you will be a key contributor to the Synapse platform - ITV’s operational data engine. We are currently on an ambitious journey to transition our data landscape to make it fit for future needs which collect and measure user behaviour, ensuring high-quality data powers ITV's core viewer experiences.

This role is roughly balanced across three pillars:

- 50% Feature building: Building new pipelines, data products and real-time capabilities.
- 25% Platform & service health: Observability, cost, decommissioning and infrastructure-as-code for your own services, alongside our dedicated DevOps engineers.
- 25% BAU & support: Ensuring platform stability and performance.

Key Responsibilities

- Pipeline Engineering: Build and maintain high-throughput streaming and batch pipelines on Dataflow and BigQuery, with Python for orchestration and tooling, utilising Go for the low-latency viewer-facing services, such as continue watching.
- Infrastructure as Code: Deploy and manage services using a "lego brick" Terraform methodology, with the flexibility to write custom pipelines when standard modules don't fit the use case.
- Testing & Quality: Write unit and integration tests as part of our Definition of Done, and help us move beyond after-the-event validation toward proactive, integrated testing, including load testing ahead of big live events.
- Observability: Set up metrics and alerting for what you ship, using native logging and monitoring dashboards defined in Terraform, alongside Grafana & Prometheus for deeper system metrics.
- Security: Implement and manage fine-grained access through GCP IAM to ensure data integrity and compliance.
- Support & Rota: Take part in the team’s support and on-call rota, triaging support issues and bugs as they are reported. Critical issues with our viewer-facing services are picked up straight away, with everything else prioritised alongside planned engineering work.

Technical Requirements

- Cloud Platform: Hands-on experience with GCP (Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Dataflow, Composer/Airflow, Cloud Functions, GKE and Cloud Build), or equivalent experience on another cloud and a willingness to go deep on GCP.
- Languages: Strong SQL, and proficient in at least one of Python, Java or Go with a willingness to pick up the others.
- Data Tools: Experience with streaming data, SQL-based transformation tooling, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Infrastructure: Good knowledge of Terraform and of deploying containerised services.
- Architectural Awareness: Ability to work within a complex high-level architecture involving event-driven streaming and multi-project environments.

Professional Attributes

- Agile Mindset: Comfortable in a mature Agile environment, participating in daily standups, sprint planning, and retrospectives.
- Collaborative: Able to work in a matrix organisation and a distributed team (UK, Brazil and Spain), liaising with Product Managers and stakeholders across Personalisation, Marketing, Commercial and Finance to refine requirements into technical tasks.
- Continuous Improvement: A desire to improve existing validation tools and contribute to the team's "tool chest" of reusable components.
- AI-curious: We are actively experimenting with AI-assisted engineering (Claude Code, Gemini ADK, Vertex AI agents) and want people who are keen to learn to use it well.