GCP Data Engineer

JOB TITLE: GCP Engineer

LOCATION: UK

REMOTE: with Occasional Office Visits to Surrey office

PAY RATE:: £442 p/day Inside IR35

12 Month Contract

*An ideal candidate with have some familiarity with the Paid Media World (agency trading desks, programmatic, ad serving, campaign data pipelines from the likes of DV360, Meta, Google Ads etc)*

DEPARTMENT OVERVIEW

We are a global technology organisation recognised for innovation and high-quality digital products and services used by millions of people every day. We support digital transformation through advanced technologies and continuously strive for operational excellence.

You will work within an established Customer Data Management (CDM) Operations Team, a mature and high-performing group responsible for a sophisticated data platform that has evolved over the past 3–4 years. The team supports marketing activities across more than 20 European markets.

PURPOSE OF THE JOB

We are seeking an experienced Senior GCP Engineer to play a key role in the continued development of data infrastructure supporting European paid media and marketing operations. This is a senior hands-on position focused on designing, building, and maintaining data engineering solutions that power media data pipelines while ensuring scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency.

The successful candidate will act as a subject matter expert within the GCP environment, working with cross-functional teams to enable seamless data integration and management. The role will support advanced analytics and data-driven decision-making for marketing teams across Europe.

KEY ACCOUNTABILITIES

• Lead the design, implementation, and maintenance of scalable and reliable ETL/ELT pipelines for paid media and marketing data on GCP.
• Manage end-to-end data flows, from ingestion via advertising platforms and ad-tech vendors through transformation and loading into BigQuery.
• Act as technical lead on media data projects, collaborating with marketing, analytics, and data science teams to deliver reliable data solutions.
• Design and implement BigQuery data models optimised for performance, cost efficiency, and business reporting requirements.
• Implement data quality frameworks, monitoring, and alerting to ensure accuracy and timeliness.
• Promote best practices in data engineering including Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD, and data governance.
• Serve as the primary contact for GCP infrastructure security audits, compliance reviews, and governance assessments, ensuring adherence to internal standards and regulatory requirements.

SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

Essential

1. Domain Experience – Paid Media & Ad Tech

• Proven hands-on experience building and maintaining data pipelines specifically for paid media and advertising data (mandatory).
• Strong familiarity with data structures and APIs from major advertising platforms including Google Ads, Meta Ads, DV360, CM360, and Appsflyer.
• Experience working within a large-scale paid media agency (e.g. GroupM, Publicis, Dentsu, IPG, Havas), an ad-tech vendor (DSP, SSP, Ad Server), or a media owner with a significant programmatic advertising operation. General martech or data consultancy experience alone is not sufficient.

2. Technical Expertise – Google Cloud Platform

• Expert-level proficiency in BigQuery and SQL including advanced optimisation, partitioning, clustering, cost control strategies, and performance tuning.
• Extensive experience designing and building production data pipelines using core GCP services such as Cloud Composer (Airflow), Dataflow, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Storage.
• Strong Python skills for data processing, scripting, and automation.
• Demonstrated experience using Terraform for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) deployment and management.
• Strong understanding of data modelling methodologies such as Kimball and Data Vault in data warehouse environments.
• Familiarity with frameworks such as Apache Beam and dbt.

3. Future-Focused & AI Awareness

• Interest in the evolution of modern data platforms and emerging technologies.
• Understanding of, or interest in learning about, the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in data engineering and analytics. Future platform development may explore use cases involving advanced AI models, and the ideal candidate will be motivated to contribute.

4. Soft Skills & Leadership

• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills with the ability to manage ambiguous requirements.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to collaborate effectively in a fast-paced environment and provide technical leadership.
• Excellent English communication skills are required due to collaboration with international teams. Additional languages are advantageous but not required.

5. Security, Compliance & Governance

• Act as the primary contact for GCP infrastructure security audits, compliance reviews, and governance assessments across the CDM data platform.
• Ensure all data pipelines and processing solutions comply with internal security policies, GDPR, and relevant European data protection regulations.
• Identify and remediate security vulnerabilities within the GCP environment in collaboration with security and legal teams.
• Maintain documentation of security controls, audit trails, and compliance status for audit purposes.
• Implement and maintain IAM best practices based on least-privilege principles across GCP services.

Desired

• Google Cloud Certified: Professional Data Engineer certification is highly desirable.
• Experience with additional cloud platforms such as AWS Redshift or Azure Data Factory is advantageous.
• Experience with Funnel.io or similar paid media aggregation platforms is beneficial.
• Familiarity with visualisation tools such as Looker or Tableau.

CHALLENGE

The organisation operates in a fast-paced and evolving environment where processes and procedures frequently change. It is important for the role holder to stay current with technology developments and assess their potential impact on the business.

Note: This job description outlines the primary responsibilities of the role but does not include every task that may be required. It is intended to support understanding between the manager and employee and may be updated as business needs evolve.