Senior Data Services Manager

About the Role

This role can be based in Cheltenham, London, Manchester or Ipswich. Due to security requirements, the role requires you to be located on site during working hours, Monday to Friday, 37.5 hours per week. DV Security Clearance is required. You must have lived in the UK for 10+ years to obtain clearance.

• Owns and leads the Data Services function, accountable for the end‑to‑end delivery of data engineering and data platform capabilities, spanning data discovery, acquisition, ingestion, storage, processing and consumption across the organisation.
• Works with the CTO office to define and execute the data services strategy, establishing scalable, secure and high‑performance data platforms that support analytics, reporting and advanced data science, aligned to business and customer objectives.
• Sets the technical direction for data architecture and platform engineering, covering data lakes, warehouses, streaming platforms and modern data pipelines, ensuring consistency, reusability and performance across the data estate.
• Leads the design and implementation of data acquisition and ingestion frameworks, enabling the integration of structured and unstructured data from multiple internal and external sources in a governed and secure manner.
• Oversees the development of data storage, transformation and normalisation capabilities, ensuring high‑quality, trusted and curated data is available for downstream consumption.

• Data Engineering
• Data Architecture
• Programming/Scripting
• Big Data Processing Data Acquisition

• Extensive experience designing and operating large‑scale data pipelines (batch and real‑time) using modern data engineering patterns
• Strong capability in ETL/ELT frameworks, data transformation, and orchestration (e.g., Apache Airflow, Azure Data Factory, Prefect)
• Deep expertise in Apache Kafka ecosystem (Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry) for real‑time data ingestion and processing
• Experience designing event‑driven architectures, ensuring scalability, fault tolerance and low‑latency data delivery
• Experience with Lakehouse architectures (Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, Hudi)
• Exposure to real‑time analytics platforms (Flink, Spark Streaming)
• Knowledge of graph databases, knowledge graphs or semantic data models
• Experience working in regulated or high‑security environments (e.g., public sector, defence)

• 15% on target annual bonus
• Access to an online private GP 24/7 for you and your immediate family
• Market‑leading paid carers leave with up to 2 weeks off
• Equalised maternity, paternity and adoption leave – 18 weeks full pay and 8 weeks half pay
• Discounted EE and BT products, including mobile and broadband
• Market‑leading pension scheme – 5% from you and 10% from us
• Holiday purchase scheme

You can select additional benefits, including healthcare, dental, gym memberships and more when you’re ready.