Lead Data Engineer
Flutter International is looking for a Lead Data Engineer to provide technical leadership for a data engineering squad. This role involves a combination of hands-on pipeline development and the establishment of engineering standards, architectural decisions, and team coordination. The successful candidate will lead the delivery of reliable, well-governed data products within a cloud-based data lakehouse to support analytics, reporting, and downstream AI/ML consumption.
The Lead Data Engineer will work closely with data platform, analytics, data science, and product teams to shape data engineering practices. They will ensure that data models accurately represent poker gameplay, player activity, and commercial metrics. This position follows a hybrid working model, allowing for a balance between home and office-based work in Sofia.
- Set technical direction for the data engineering squad, establishing standards for pipeline design, data modelling patterns, testing practices, and code quality.
- Lead architectural decisions for data pipeline and data model design, evaluating approaches for ingestion, transformation, and serving.
- Represent data engineering in cross-functional forums including architecture reviews, data governance discussions, and platform evolution planning.
- Design, build, and maintain complex batch and streaming data pipelines.
- Own and evolve core data models providing a single source of truth for poker gameplay, player activity, and commercial metrics.
- Drive pipeline reliability and performance improvements, establishing monitoring, alerting, and data quality validation standards.
- Coordinate work across the data engineering squad, ensuring effective task distribution, delivery cadence, and alignment with sprint commitments.
- Mentor and coach data engineers within the team, conducting code reviews and driving knowledge sharing.
- Support downstream consumers in understanding available data products and their appropriate use.
- 7+ years of experience building data pipelines in cloud-based data lakehouse or data warehouse environments, including both batch and streaming ingestion patterns (required)
- Proven technical leadership experience within a data engineering team, including setting development standards, leading design discussions, and making architectural decisions (required)
- Strong skills in Python and SQL for data transformation, processing, and pipeline development at scale (required)
- Deep experience with event-driven data ingestion from streaming platforms, including schema management, consumer group coordination, and backfill strategies (required)
- Solid understanding of data modelling concepts including star schema, medallion architecture, slowly changing dimensions, and data quality frameworks (required)
- Excellent communication and leadership skills with the ability to coordinate across teams, mentor engineers, and engage with stakeholders (required)
- Experience with Databricks, including notebooks, jobs, Delta Lake, and Unity Catalog for data governance in multi-team environments (preferred)
- Familiarity with Kafka for stream ingestion and real-time data product consumption, including schema registry and Protobuf serialisation (preferred)
- Experience with Terraform for data infrastructure provisioning and environment management (preferred)
- Background in leading distributed data engineering teams across multiple locations (preferred)
- Experience in regulated or B2B platform environments where data compliance, auditability, and multi-jurisdictional data handling are important (preferred)
- Working knowledge of data quality monitoring frameworks and automated data validation practices (preferred)
- Discretionary annual performance bonus
- 30 days paid leave
- Health and Dental Insurance for you, your partner and your children
- Personal life insurance and disability coverage
- Wellbeing fund
- Continuous learning support for certifications and career growth
- 26 weeks primary carer leave at 100% pay
- 4 weeks secondary carer leave at 100% pay
- Sports card membership valid across the country
- Monthly food vouchers
Flutter International is the international division of Flutter Entertainment, the world's leading online sports betting and gaming company. It operates a portfolio of brands including PokerStars, Betfair International, Adjarabet, Sisal, Snai, Betnacional, Junglee Games and MaxBet across markets outside the UK, Ireland, US and Australia. The division combines world-class brands with global scale and a challenger mindset, drawing on shared capabilities the group calls the "Flutter Edge". Flutter Entertainment is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and London Stock Exchange.