Principal Data and Platform Engineer

Principal Data and Platform Engineer - Audience Measurement Make Your Mark at Ipsos The Audience Measurement team at Ipsos uses a deep understanding of people to make sense of audiences and how they consume media. We use these insights to influence media strategy, helping clients to answer crucial questions, such as how to target audiences, maximise attention across platforms, enhance audience experience, and demonstrate or increase audience value. We are recruiting a Principal Data and Platform Engineer for one of our flagship accounts, Out Of Home – Route. Your work will be pivotal to the Route project's long‑term success. As the technical and strategic leader of the data platform, you will be responsible for championing the architectural vision and translating it into a practical, implementable strategy. You will be the linchpin between senior stakeholders, clients, and the engineering team, ensuring the platform evolves to meet future demands while enabling data scientists to deliver cutting‑edge research and innovation. This is a hands‑on leadership role that combines high‑level strategy with deep technical implementation and mentorship. What will I be doing? As the Principal Data and Platform Engineer on the ground‑breaking Route project, you will lead the evolution of the data infrastructure for a first‑of‑its‑kind synthetic travel survey, which generates audience figures for Out‑of‑Home media in Great Britain. You will be accountable for the platform’s vision, strategy, and execution, guiding the team to build and optimise a world‑class data ecosystem. Key responsibilities Vision and Strategy: Champion and maintain the overarching vision for our data platform, effectively communicating it to all stakeholders and translating it into a practical strategy documented and managed in Confluence and Azure DevOps. Technical Leadership and Line Management: Act as the lead technical authority for both platform and data engineering, providing line management for 1‑2 other Data Engineers. You will guide team members on implementation best practices, code structure, and team standards to ensure high‑quality, scalable solutions. Platform Operations and Management: Oversee the operational functionality of our 'homegrown' data platform, ensuring it is well‑documented and easy to operate for our Ops team. You will be the primary point of contact for managing tools like Azure DevOps, our Docker image‑building pipelines, and access for new team members, with minimal support from central IT. Hands‑On Engineering and Implementation: Serve as a senior practitioner in both platform engineering (permissions, infrastructure, security) and data engineering (pipelines, data modelling) to personally implement and drive the platform vision. This includes supporting operational tasks such as key rotations, managing GCP project costs, and handling ad‑hoc requests for release processing. Data Science Enablement: Design, research, and implement the tools (Jupyter Hub, Vertex AI) and processes necessary to empower data scientists, enabling them to efficiently productionise models and research on GCP using technologies like Argo Workflows. Agile Methodologies: Champion the use of Scrum & SAFe Agile Methodologies within the team, driving continual improvement in our delivery of capabilities, epics, features, and user stories. Stakeholder and Client Relations: Cultivate strong relationships with clients and internal teams, acting as a key technical advisor, explaining complex approaches, and ensuring the platform meets contractual and strategic objectives. Continuous Improvement and Innovation: Continuously research, evaluate, and advocate for new tools, techniques, and best‑practice solutions to drive digital transformation and ensure the long‑term success of the project. Our Tech Stack GCP: GCS, BigQuery, GKE, Artifact Registry, Vertex AI, App Engine, Data Store, Secret Manager, Pub/Sub Open‑Source Tools: Argo Workflows, Argo Events, dbt, Elementary, Cerberus, Terraform, Jupyter Hub, Docker, Kubernetes Coding Languages: Python, SQL, JavaScript (minimal) CI / CD & PM Tools: Azure DevOps, Confluence, Jira, GitHub What do I need to bring with me? It is essential that your leadership attributes and strategic mindset complement your deep technical skills. To be successful in this role you will need the following skills and experience : Extensive commercial experience in data and platform engineering, with a proven track record of designing, building, and maintaining scalable, resilient data platforms. While our platform is built on GCP, we welcome strong candidates with deep expertise in Azure or AWS who are willing to transfer their skills. Demonstrable experience in a leadership or mentorship capacity, with the ability to define a technical vision and guide a team to execute it. Previous line management experience is highly desirable. Expert‑level proficiency in architecting and implementing scalable data pipelines using tools like Argo Workflows on GKE, advanced SQL on BigQuery, and Python libraries such as Pandas. Deep experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), containerisation (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes). Proven ability to communicate a technical vision and strategy to diverse stakeholders, including clients and non‑technical audiences. Strong understanding of Agile methodologies, with direct experience championing Scrum and / or SAFe principles. Experience supporting data science workflows, including the deployment and productionisation of AI / ML models. A forward‑thinking, innovative, and collaborative mindset with a passion for continuous improvement and fostering a positive team environment. GCP Professional Data Engineer or Cloud Architect certifications are preferred, but not essential. Benefits We offer a comprehensive benefits package designed to support you as an individual. Our standard benefits include 25 days annual leave, pension contribution, income protection and life assurance. In addition, there are a range of health & wellbeing, financial benefits and professional development opportunities. We realise you may have commitments outside of work and will consider flexible working applications – please highlight what you are looking for when you make your application. We have a hybrid approach to work and ask people to be in the office or with clients for 3 days per week. We are committed to equality, treating people fairly, promoting a positive and inclusive working environment and ensuring we have diversity of people and views. We recognise that this is important for our business success – a more diverse workforce will enable us to better reflect and understand the world we research and ultimately deliver better research and insight to our clients. We are proud to be a member of the Disability Confident scheme, certified as Level 1 Disability Confident Committed. We are dedicated to providing an inclusive and accessible recruitment process. #J-18808-Ljbffr