Location
London

Hours
Full Time

Salary
Competitive, commensurate with experience

About the Role
Alto Software Group is a B2B SaaS company powering more than half of all UK housing transactions annually. We deliver software solutions connecting businesses and consumers, providing a one-stop shop for estate agents and home builders. Our mission is to drive efficiency, speed up transactions, reduce risk, and improve the end-customer experience. Operating with a startup mindset within a fast-growing and evolving business, this is an exciting time to join us.

We are seeking an experienced Data Platform Engineering Manager to lead a small team of data platform engineers. This role is a genuine 50/50 split between hands-on engineering and people & delivery management. Reporting to the Head of Platform & Data Engineering and partnering closely with the Technical Product Manager, you will lead around three engineers day-to-day. Your focus will be on scaling our data lakehouse, delivering infrastructure for new data commercialisation products, and building reusable building blocks that enable teams across Alto to move data safely and quickly.

Key responsibilities include recruiting, guiding, and nurturing a diverse and seasoned data platform engineering team; collaborating on roadmap development and prioritisation; hands-on engineering including writing Python and Terraform, system design, code reviews, and shipping platform capabilities; owning delivery from design through deployment; and partnering with product, commercial, and engineering teams to translate complex business problems into elegant, customer-focused data solutions.

You will also contribute to modernising our data infrastructure, including migrating data from legacy SQL Server monoliths into the lakehouse, introducing data retention policies, and adopting modern SQL frameworks and languages to ensure a resilient and performant platform ready for future challenges.

Our Technology Stack
Data Platform: Databricks, DBT, Fivetran
Languages: Python, SQL
Databases: SQL Server (legacy, being modernised), lakehouse storage on S3
Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (EventBridge, Kinesis, Lambda, S3, EC2), Terraform (Infrastructure as Code)
Streaming: Kafka
Containers & Orchestration: ECS, Kubernetes

Experience
- Senior data or platform engineer with strong Python skills and proven experience building reliable data platform infrastructure
- Hands-on experience with AWS and Terraform, comfortable with infrastructure-as-code
- Experience with modern lakehouse or warehouse platforms (Databricks preferred, or Snowflake/BigQuery)
- Familiarity with data ingestion and transformation tools such as Fivetran and DBT
- Knowledge of Kafka or similar streaming systems and event-driven data flows
- Solid SQL skills and understanding of data modelling
- Awareness of container orchestration technologies (ECS, Kubernetes) and production data workloads
- Experience managing software engineers, ideally data or data platform engineers, including hiring, performance management, coaching, and career development
- Ability to lead technical discussions and oversee delivery for a data platform product area
- Comfortable engaging with internal customers and stakeholders to understand their needs
- Skilled in effective communication, including asynchronous documentation such as Architectural Decision Records (ADRs)
- Able to operate with significant alignment and independence in a dynamic environment
- Platform mindset focused on building tools and paved roads that simplify other engineers' work

About You
- Passionate about staying technical and hands-on as part of your management role
- Collaborative team player who shares early-stage work and embraces constructive feedback
- Pragmatic problem-solver who navigates ambiguity and finds simple solutions
- Eager to learn new technologies and stay current with industry trends
- Customer-focused with a genuine interest in internal customers' perspectives
- Motivated to deliver high-quality software at pace and take ownership of outcomes
- Excited to grow and develop within a fast-changing business environment

Qualifications
- No specific formal qualifications required; a solid foundation in data engineering and eagerness to learn are essential
- Commitment to diversity and inclusion, welcoming applicants from all backgrounds