Data Engineering Manager

Role Purpose

At Travelex, we are building modern, scalable, and real-time data platforms that sit at the core of our customer and business experience. As our data ecosystem evolves into a more service-oriented, cloud-native, and analytics-driven landscape, we are looking for a Data Engineering Manager to lead the engineering capability that powers it.

This role combines technical leadership, people management, architecture oversight, and delivery ownership. You will lead a team of data engineers responsible for designing, building, and maintaining scalable data pipelines, platforms, and services while driving engineering best practices, innovation, and operational excellence.

You'll work closely with stakeholders across technology, analytics, product, and business teams to deliver reliable and high-performing data solutions that support reporting, advanced analytics, and data-driven decision making. Alongside leadership responsibilities, you'll remain close to technology and architecture, guiding the team through complex engineering challenges and influencing the future direction of Travelex's data platform.

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Responsibilities

Here are some of the key things you'll do as a Data Engineering Manager in our team. The list isn't exhaustive — we value leaders who bring fresh ideas, challenge the status quo, and help shape a world-class data organisation.

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of data engineers, fostering a culture of collaboration, ownership, learning, and engineering excellence.
• Define and drive the technical roadmap for data engineering in alignment with business and technology strategies.
• Oversee the design, development, and deployment of scalable data pipelines, transformation frameworks, and modern data platforms.
• Collaborate with business stakeholders, analysts, architects, and product teams to translate business requirements into robust data solutions.
• Establish and enforce engineering standards, coding practices, CI/CD processes, testing approaches, and operational best practices.
• Provide architectural guidance across data warehousing, lakehouse design, Databricks-based platforms, streaming, APIs, and real-time data integration.
• Ensure solutions are secure, scalable, reliable, cost-efficient, and aligned with governance standards.
• Drive optimisation initiatives for performance, scalability, observability, and operational efficiency across cloud and Databricks environments.
• Lead technical discussions, solution reviews, estimations, prioritisation, and sprint planning activities.
• Support the adoption of cloud-native technologies, automation, Infrastructure-as-Code, and modern DevOps practices.
• Build strong partnerships with data analysts, data scientists, and business teams to enable self-service analytics and reusable data assets.
• Define monitoring, alerting, and incident management practices for critical data services and pipelines.
• Manage delivery timelines, risks, dependencies, and stakeholder communication across multiple initiatives.
• Encourage innovation and continuous improvement through experimentation, knowledge sharing, and engineering best practices.
• Support hiring activities, capability building, and succession planning within the team.

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Key Requirements

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys leading high-performing engineering teams while remaining technically engaged in solving complex data challenges. You do not need to tick every box — we value curiosity, leadership, and problem-solving as much as technical expertise.

• Significant experience leading and managing data engineering teams in cloud-based environments.
• Strong hands-on experience with AWS data services focused on pipelines, transformation, storage, streaming, and orchestration.
• Strong experience working with Databricks, including Delta Lake, notebooks, workflows, cluster management, and optimisation of Spark-based data processing workloads.
• Excellent understanding of modern data engineering practices using technologies such as SQL, Python, DBT, Airflow, Spark, Databricks, or similar frameworks.
• Experience designing and implementing scalable data platforms, warehouse/lakehouse architectures, and dimensional data models.
• Strong understanding of service-oriented and event-driven architectures, including APIs, streams, and webhooks.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, DevOps practices, Infrastructure-as-Code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, or similar).
• Strong knowledge of data governance, security, lineage, cataloguing, and data quality frameworks.
• Experience implementing monitoring, logging, and observability solutions for data platforms.
• Proven ability to lead architecture discussions, technical design reviews, and engineering decision-making.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to simplify complex technical concepts for non-technical audiences.
• Experience managing delivery across multiple priorities in Agile environments.
• Demonstrated ability to coach, mentor, and develop engineering talent.
• A passion for automation, continuous improvement, and building scalable engineering practices.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making capabilities.
• Curiosity to understand the business, customer needs, and operational challenges.
• Your own unique leadership and engineering style that contributes to a diverse and innovative team culture.

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Why Travelex

To remain the world's leading foreign exchange specialist, we are focused on making our customers lives simpler, more engaging, and hassle-free while they travel or move money abroad. We promise to give them the freedom and peace of mind to explore the world their way — enabling them to travel confidently because they know they have us to lean on.

Customer centricity and digital are at the heart of our business strategy. Our commitment to innovation has never been greater, with the development of several digital-first, greenfield products and services. Backed by Travelex's resources, deep industry experience, and trusted global brand, we are shaping the future of FX, cross-border e-commerce, and international payments.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.