Senior Manager - Data Engineering

About the Role:

This role sits within our Data and Technology team.

In this role, you will own and extend our config-driven data platform (DMC), which standardises ingestion, transformation, and delivery of paid media data across 26+ ad platforms for multiple global clients. You will work closely with our team to build and maintain ELT pipelines — from Cloud Function ingestion into BigQuery through to dbt-powered transformation — ensuring the highest standard in data integrity and scalability.

This is an exciting role with excellent career opportunities within a high-profile team and scope to strategically shape the agency. We are looking for someone who can hit the ground running, contribute to a mature mono-repo data platform, and help drive best practices across the engineering team. Experience with digital media data is highly beneficial.

Responsibilities:

• Own and extend the end-to-end data pipeline — from Cloud Function ingestion through dbt transformation (staging → intermediate → marts) to analysis-ready tables in BigQuery.
• Develop and maintain dbt macros, Jinja templates, and platform YAML definitions that auto-generate models across 26+ ad platforms.
• Manage and improve GCP infrastructure (BigQuery, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Cloud Scheduler, Pub/Sub) provisioned via Terraform.
• Build and maintain the Python CLI tooling that orchestrates client onboarding, config compilation, and pipeline execution.
• Mentor the team of data engineers, driving best practices in DataOps, code review, testing, and documentation.
• Proactively review existing processes to identify opportunities to automate manual work, optimise data delivery, and re-design infrastructure for greater scalability.
• Collaborate with analysts, data scientists, and BI teams (PowerBI, Looker Studio, Tableau, etc.) to maximise the value delivered from data models.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines (Cloud Build), testing (pytest, dbt tests), and documentation (MkDocs, etc.).

About You

Required:

• Strong experience with dbt — macros, Jinja templating, incremental models, seeds, testing, and packages.
• Proficient in Python 3.11+ — building CLI tools, data processing, and automation.
• Proficient in SQL, ideally BigQuery dialect.
• Experience with Google Cloud Platform — especially BigQuery, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Scheduler
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) for provisioning and managing cloud resources.
• Solid understanding of data modelling techniques (star schema, dim/fact architecture, slowly changing dimensions).
• Comfortable with Git (GitHub, branching strategies, pull requests) and CI/CD (Cloud Build or similar).
• Ability to translate business needs into technical specifications.

Highly Desirable:

• Experience with Docker and containerised workloads (Cloud Run Jobs).
• Familiarity with CLI frameworks (Click) and config-driven architectures (Pydantic, YAML-based configuration).
• Knowledge of the digital media / paid media industry — we process data from 26+ ad platforms (Google Ads, Meta, DV360, TikTok, etc.).
• Exposure to multi-cloud integrations (Azure Blob, AWS S3, SFTP).
• Mono-repo experience — managing multi-client configurations in a single codebase.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with Databricks (and dbt-databricks).
• Familiarity with modern Python dev tooling — Poetry, ruff, mypy, pre-commit.
• Experience with docs-as-code (MkDocs or similar).

Qualities:

• Ownership – an ability to manage multiple workstreams across clients with accuracy, and see things through from design to deployment.
• Curiosity – a natural inclination to explore new tools, dig into unfamiliar systems, and understand how things work end-to-end.
• Resourcefulness – an ability to unblock yourself, whether that means reading source code, querying logs, or finding creative workarounds when data or documentation is limited.
• Problem-solving – an ability to think through complex data issues methodically and design clean, maintainable solutions.
• Collaboration – a desire to work openly, share knowledge, and build a team culture where code reviews and pair programming are valued.

About the Agency:

At OMD EMEA, we strive to deliver on our promise of ‘better decisions, faster‘ for our clients, partners and all 6,000+ OMDers across our region every day. As part of the world’s largest media network, our business is staging experiences for consumers who have more choice and less attention than ever before. The key to the process is empathy. Empathy to see the world through the eyes of the consumer, to recognise the needs of our clients and to identify aspirations of our talent.

Learn Fast, Act Fast. To help navigate the road to a ‘new normal’, learning from, and acting upon data signals at scale and speed is crucial. Visit Why OMD? to learn more about our unique Act Fast Framework.

Our working pattern for colleagues is to be present in the office three days a week at our offices in London with the other days available to work remotely. Let us know if you have any questions about our working pattern as part of your application and interview process.