Data Quality & Governance Engineer

About Reward

Founded in 2001, Reward is an industry leader transforming the world of customer engagement and commerce media. Operating in 15 countries across Europe, Middle East and Asia, Reward's cloud-based API platform integrates content, advertising, and commerce to deliver exceptional experiences for consumers resulting in increased customer engagement, retention, and overall satisfaction.

Reward's Loyalty-tech platform is behind many award-winning bank loyalty programmes seen today from brands such as Visa, NatWest Group, Barclays, and First Abu Dhabi Bank to name a few. Reward also works with the world's largest retailers such as McDonald's, eBay, Deliveroo and Amazon.

Their leading commerce media platform fuses purchase insights with loyalty-tech, offering an unparalleled edge in digital advertising and performance marketing for retailers. Leveraging rich data and insights, the Reward platform provides a comprehensive view of consumer behaviour, empowering retailers to target marketing messages more effectively, resulting in independently verified sales uplift and long-term customer lifetime value.

Beyond bridging the gap between content and commerce, Reward is a purpose driven business. Their mission is to make everyday spending more rewarding. During the last 5 years, Reward has proudly given back more than $1billion in cashback rewards to consumers world-wide.

Most recently, Reward's rapid growth was recognised in The Independent's E2ETech100 list of fastest growing tech scale-ups in the UK. Reward, in conjunction with partners NatWest Group, was also awarded the Industry Achievement Award 2023 at the prestigious Card and Payments Awards.

Role Summary

We are seeking a Data Quality & Governance Engineer to ensure our data is accurate, complete, trusted, and compliant. You will design and operationalize data quality controls, establish and maintain end‐to‐end lineage, and embed governance-by-design across data products and pipelines. You'll partner with engineering, analytics, security, and compliance to lead quality improvement and regulatory alignment initiatives at scale.

Responsibilities

· Data Quality Engineering

• Define and implement data quality rules (validity, completeness, uniqueness, timeliness, conformity, integrity) across ingestion, transformation, and serving layers.
• Build automated DQ testing and observability (anomaly detection, SLAs/SLOs) within CI/CD and orchestration workflows.
• Develop golden datasets and remediation playbooks; drive root‐cause analysis and preventative fixes.

· Data Lineage & Metadata

• Implement and maintain column‐level lineage across batch and streaming pipelines.
• Enrich metadata (technical, business, operational) and integrate with data catalog and business glossary.
• Ensure lineage visibility for auditors, stewards, and data product owners.

· Governance & Compliance

• Operationalize data policies (classification, retention, access, usage) and embed privacy & security controls (e.g., PII handling, masking, tokenization).
• Align with regulatory obligations (e.g., GDPR/UK GDPR, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001) and support internal/external audits.
• Partner with Legal/Security/Compliance to implement governed data sharing and data contracts.

· Enablement & Leadership

• Lead quality improvement programs: define targets, metrics, and runbooks; drive adoption with product teams.
• Mentor engineers/analysts on best practices in DQ, lineage, and governance-by-design.
• Publish dashboards and scorecards for data product quality; present progress to leadership.

Requirements

• 5+ years in Data Engineering, Data Quality, or Data Governance roles with production systems.
• Strong SQL and hands-on experience with one or more: Spark/Databricks, dbt, Airflow/Databricks Workflows, Kafka/Kinesis, Python.
• Experience implementing data quality frameworks and observability (e.g., Great Expectations, Soda, Monte Carlo, Databricks DQ, BigQuery DQ, OpenLineage).
• Practical knowledge of catalogs/lineage tools (e.g., Collibra, Alation, Purview, DataHub, Atlan).
• Understanding of governance frameworks (data classification, glossary, stewardship, ownership, access controls).
• Solid grasp of privacy & compliance (GDPR/UK GDPR principles, DPIAs, data minimization, retention) and security (RBAC/ABAC, masking, encryption, key management).

Core Competencies

• Ownership & Bias for Action: Proactively drives remediation and preventive controls.
• Systems Thinking: Connects business rules to technical lineage and platform constraints.
• Communication: Translates complex data issues into clear, actionable insights for execs and engineers.
• Risk Mindset: Balances speed and control; anticipates audit and compliance needs.
• Collaboration: Works cross-functionally with platform, analytics, InfoSec, and Legal.

Benefits

• Annual Leave: 25 days + bank holidays
• Ability to buy and sell holiday days as well as the ability to bank days (tenure dependant)
• Flexible working options: we are operating a hybrid working model with 3 days a week from the office
• Pension: Hargreaves Lansdown – up to 6% matched contribution
• Employee share scheme
• Generous family friendly cover
• Private healthcare - Bupa
• Income protection
• Critical illness cover
• Life insurance cover
• Dental cover
• Optical cover
• Yulife app for access to employee wellbeing and discounts
• Perks at Work, cashback/discount shopping site
• Employee referral scheme
• Salary sacrifice program which includes cycle to work scheme, electric car scheme and season ticket loans
• Volunteering program
• Company events i.e. Christmas party, all-company event and other social/hosted events during the year (we have an active social committee!)
• Team socials