Data Platform Engineering Manager – AWS, Databricks

Role Overview

• Helping recruit, guide, and nurture a diverse and seasoned data platform engineering team. We consistently enhance and review our recruitment efforts to achieve progress in this area.
• Collaborating with your peers, the Technical Product Manager and the Head of Platform & Data Engineering to develop and expand our data platform engineering function through efficient interviewing, recruitment, and orientation processes.
• Guiding, advising and coaching data platform engineers through regular one-on-one meetings, objective setting, and continuous feedback cycles.
• Partnering with the Technical Product Manager to shape the roadmap, prioritise effectively across competing demands, and deliver predictably for internal and external customers.
• Spending roughly half your time hands-on — writing Python and Terraform, designing systems, reviewing code, and shipping platform capabilities alongside the team. This is a working manager role, not a step away from the keyboard.
• Taking ownership of delivery from design through to deployment, either independently or as part of a collaborative team.
• Collaborating with product, commercial and engineering teams across Alto to translate complex business problems into elegant, customer-focused data solutions.
• Contributing to the modernisation of our data infrastructure — including the ongoing work to extract data from our legacy SQL Server monolith into the lakehouse, introduce data retention policies, and migrate to modern SQL frameworks and languages — ensuring our platform is resilient, performant and ready for what's next.

Requirements

• A senior data or platform engineer with strong Python skills and a track record of building data platform infrastructure that other engineers and analysts depend on.
• Hands-on experience with AWS and Terraform, and a comfort with infrastructure-as-code as the default way of working.
• Experience with a modern lakehouse or warehouse platform (Databricks ideally, or Snowflake/BigQuery), and with data ingestion and transformation tools (Fivetran/DBT).
• Familiarity with Kafka or similar streaming systems, and an appreciation of the abstractions that make event-driven data flows easy for other teams to adopt.
• Solid SQL skills and a good sense for data modelling, even if it isn't the main thing you do day to day.
• Awareness of container orchestration (ECS, Kubernetes) and how data workloads run in production.
• Experience managing software engineers — ideally data or data platform engineers — including hiring, performance management, coaching and career development.
• A genuine appetite for staying technical. You see hands-on engineering as core to the role, not a distraction from "real" management work.
• Capable of leading technical discussions among the team and overseeing performance and delivery for a data platform product area.
• Comfortable engaging directly with internal customers and stakeholders to understand their problems and what matters most to them.
• Drive effective communication within and across teams. This includes asynchronous communication via documentation; we use Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) so teams can let others know what they are working on.
• Accustomed to operating with significant alignment and independence, and comfortable navigating technical and organisational uncertainty.
• A platform mindset — you take pride in building tools, templates and paved roads that make other engineers' lives easier, and you instil that same mindset in your team.

Tech Stack

• AWS
• BigQuery
• Kafka
• Kubernetes
• Python
• SQL
• Terraform

Benefits

• Hybrid
• 2 days per week in our London HQ for team collaboration
• Opportunities for career development and advancement within a growing organisation.
• Everyday Flex
• greater flexibility over where and when you work
• 25 days annual leave + extra days for years of service
• Day off for volunteering & Digital detox day
• Festive Closure
• business closed for period between Christmas and New Year
• Cycle to work and electric car schemes
• Free Calm App membership
• Enhanced Parental leave
• Fertility Treatment Financial Support
• Group Income Protection and private medical insurance
• Gym on-site in London
• 7.5% pension contribution by the company
• Discretionary annual bonus up to 10% of base salary
• Talent referral bonus up to £5K