Lead Data Engineer

About the role

ITV is looking for a Lead Data Engineer in White City, London, working on its real-time operational data ecosystem. The role balances high-level architecture, hands-on engineering and mentorship, with 40% design and architecture, 40% engineering and 20% mentorship and governance. It is a permanent full-time position with a hybrid arrangement of 1-2 days a week on site, and a closing date of 23 November 2026.

Key responsibilities

• Translate business roadmaps into high-level designs for event-driven streaming solutions, defining structures, components and interactions
• Architect high-throughput, real-time data ingestion pipelines in partnership with DevOps specialists
• Mentor the engineering squad, run code reviews, share knowledge and manage technical debt
• Work with the Engineering Manager and Product Managers to turn requirements into technical tasks and keep the backlog lean
• Set up a proactive monitoring strategy via Grafana/Prometheus to protect platform reliability under heavy traffic
• Take part in the weekly support rotation and lead Root Cause Analysis on critical incidents

Required profile

• Demonstrable experience leading technical system designs and defining architecture in a high-scale, cloud-native operational data environment
• Proven hands-on experience with high-throughput, real-time data ingestion and processing pipelines
• Experience mentoring engineers, managing technical debt and steering code-first DevOps cultures
• Nice to have: familiarity with ESG or sustainable software engineering, or experience moving data capabilities to edge environments

Required skills

• Backend development in Python and Go, with Java or Scala as secondaries
• GCP stack (GKE, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Dataflow, Cloud Functions) and event-driven architectures
• Terraform and Kubernetes
• Ability to explain complex technical designs to engineers and non-technical stakeholders

What we offer

• Salary of £85k-£100k
• Flexible working options
• Generous holiday allowance, annual bonus opportunity and competitive pension contribution
• Opportunity to buy ITV shares, wellbeing and volunteering days