Head of Data Engineering & Infrastructure, UK

We are Multiverse, a tech scaleup with a social mission. We’re creating a diverse group of future leaders by building an outstanding alternative to university and corporate training, through the power of professional apprenticeships.

We’re one of the fastest-growing businesses in Europe and rapidly expanding in North America, working with over 500 clients including Facebook, KPMG, Morgan Stanley and the NHS. In June 2022, we broke the EdTech funding record (again!) by announcing our $220m Series D, making Multiverse the UK’s first ever EdTech unicorn.

Join us on our journey to democratising access to the best careers and learning opportunities.

The opportunity

As Head of Data Engineering & Infrastructure, you will be responsible for the technologies, people and processes that underpin our data pipeline, which ultimately serves and enables every part of our business.

This role will be within the Data & Insight team, reporting to the VP of Data & Insight. While this is a leadership role and you will manage a small team of Data & Infrastructure Engineers, it will also involve a lot of hands-on work. Our team culture is one where everyone gets involved in development tasks and leaders are expected to develop in-depth knowledge of our business, our data and the systems that underpin them. You will therefore need to be pragmatic, collaborative, innovative and tenacious, balancing hands-on technical development work with people, project & stakeholder management.

What you’ll focus on:

Data Pipeline

• Mastering, maintaining & optimising our current data pipeline - owning all underlying infrastructure, connectors, transformation logic, database assets & related processes
• Iteratively designing, building & migrating towards our future data pipeline, optimising for security, reliability, performance, efficiency, scalability & cost
• Owning & managing our data technology stack - inc Cloud, ETL, Storage, Modelling, APIs - identifying & evaluating new technologies/approaches vs our requirements
• Integrating key systems - inc third party tools and in-house technologies built by Multiverse’s Engineering team - with our data pipeline
• Managing ongoing technological and processes change as our data pipeline evolves from its current to future state
  
  

Leadership

• Being a core member of our Data & Insight leadership team - owning data engineering & infrastructure decisions while also contributing towards broader decisions around data products, analytics, data science, solutions, systems etc
• Planning quarterly data engineering & infrastructure roadmap deliverables in line with Data & Insight team strategy and overarching business needs
• Coordinating weekly team activity, balancing prioritisation of quarterly roadmap deliverables against urgent tactical needs
• Managing & developing a small team (currently ~6 people) of technical specialists
• Introducing & recruiting new technical roles as required
  
  

Collaboration

• Liaising closely with other leaders within the Data & Insight team (e.g. Product, Analytics, Data Science) - including collaborative prioritisation, resourcing & data product development
• Building & maintaining a symbiotic relationship with Multiverse's Engineering team (which develops the online Platform used by our customers, candidates & apprentices) - including alignment on technologies, standards & practices
• Maintaining transparent lines of communication with Multiverse's Information Security & Data Privacy/Protection leaders - ensuring that all data technologies & associated processes are compliant with legal requirements & industry best practice
• Commissioning & overseeing projects/products delivered by external technical partners
  
  

What we’re looking for:

Required:

• 8+ years of relevant Data Engineering and/or Infrastructure experience
• 2+ years of relevant people leadership experience
• Proven track record of producing high quality data engineering & infrastructure deliverables within a fast paced, high growth environment
• Passion for mastering complex business logic and translating it into actionable data pipelines via SQL (ideally Postgre) and/or Python
• Significant experience with AWS (inc EC2, Lambda, RDS, Fargate), ETL, GitHub,Continuous Integration/Delivery, Infrastructure as Code (ideally Terraform), Orchestration, Scripting, Containers, Feature Stores, APIs
• Experience with productionising data science models for use with enterprise applications
• Proven ability to inspire, motivate and develop a team of ambitious, high-performing technical specialists
• Strong communication skills and demonstrable ability to collaborate with both technical and non-technical colleagues
• Pragmatic, ‘can-do’ approach with a proven record of turning challenges into opportunities
• Comfort with and meticulous attention to detail
• Commitment to Multiverse’s mission and values
  
  

Non-Required (But Desirable):

• Experience using Asana (or similar) to manage quarterly/ongoing deliverables
• Experience with Sagemaker, Tableau and/or Alteryx
• Experience with Salesforce, Qualtrics and other relevant systems’ APIs
• Working knowledge of Python, PHP and/or Java
• Understanding of education/skills sector