Data Platform Engineering Manager; AWS, Databricks

Alto Software Group is a B2B SaaS company that powers more than half of all UK housing transactions each year. We create software solutions that connect businesses and consumers, delivering a one-stop shop for estate agents and home builders. Our goal is to drive efficiency, speed up transactions, reduce risk, and improve the end-customer experience.

While we’re not a startup, we operate with a startup mindset. We’re looking for people who share this mentality and are ready to tackle big ambitions. This is a fast-growing and exciting business going through significant change, and there’s never been a better time to join us.

We’re seeking an experienced Data Platform Engineering Manager to help lead a small team of data platform engineers. The role is a genuine 50/50 split between hands‑on engineering and people & delivery management.

You’ll report to the Head of Platform & Data Engineering, partner closely with our Technical Product Manager, and lead around three engineers day‑to‑day — scaling our data lakehouse, delivering the infrastructure behind new data commercialisation products, and building the reusable building blocks that let teams across Alto move data safely and quickly.

• 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.

We believe in using the right tool for the job. Our current stack includes:

Data Platform:
Databricks, DBT, Fivetran

Languages:

Python, SQL

Databases: SQL Server (legacy, being modernised), plus lakehouse storage on S3

Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (Event Bridge, Kinesis, Lambda, S3, EC2), Terraform (Infrastructure as Code)

Streaming:
Kafka

Containers & Orchestration: ECS, Kubernetes

• 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/Big Query), 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…