News UK Principal Data Engineer

We are:News UK is a company full of talented, dedicated and creative people. We are an ambitious and ever-growing organisation with a passion for storytelling, capturing moments, meaning and magic to make sense of the world. Our newspapers reach more than 30 million people each week and include The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times. News UK is also home to Wireless, a leading UK and Irish media company boasting independent local and national radio stations including talkSPORT, VirginRadio, talkRADIO and TimesRadio.

We are Technology: a department that has people and product at its heart. Lead by Christina Scott CTO of the Year (Tech Leaders) 2017, who comes with many years experience transforming technology in media companies. Christina has set out our vision of ‘passionate and trusted experts creating industry-leading solutions through attracting and developing the best talent’.  

Your team; Data Platforms, an award-winning programme (Drum Online Media Awards 2018, British Media Awards 2018) that comprises a number of agile, cross-functional teams between London and Bangalore. We own data platforms, and enable teams to build front-end products and create predictive models for News UK. We focus on the capture, management and utilisation of customer, clickstream and content data in our warehouses, in order to drive growth and increase revenue for our users. Our users include the newsroom editors, marketing, analytics, advertising and product teams associated with our world-leading digital and print publications. Our data architecture includes customer and digital data built in our Unified Data Platform in Google BigQuery. 

Your role: You will own the creation, maintenance and delivery of the business intelligence layer of our data platforms, to ensure business can access data from the data warehouse easily and in a consistent and abstracted manner in order to drive value from our data.

Day to day you will: 

• Be primarily responsible for the technical delivery of business intelligence and data warehousing projects and initiatives for the business units at NewsUK along with a team of on-shore and off-shore Data engineers.


•  Lead a team of data specialists (e.g. architect, business analysts, data engineers) to own and maintain the data warehouse and business intelligence layers for both batch and real-time data consumption across business units like Campaigns, Analytics, Data Science etc.


• Be the primary technical interface between the team and external stakeholders across the business (Campaigns, Analytics, Ads, etc.) and internal stakeholders in Data Technology (Data products, Data science etc.)


• Manage and own the end to end workflow and process from user request to design, implementation, work allocation, technical outputs and operations. You will be working closely with an Agile scrum master/delivery manager to ensure process and workflow are clearly understood and followed and also to align with expectations on delivery dates.


• Be responsible for BI/DW technical solution of new requirements and platform improvements. The Principal Data Engineer will need to understand the impact of introducing new requirements into current platforms, and define the best technical solution 


• Responsible for technical implementation based on best BI/DW best practices


• Responsible for the daily operation of the DW platforms, implementation of Operations KPIs for continuous improvement, definition of SLAs, and manage operations communications with business users.

What we’re looking for from you:

• You will have strong consulting skills, working with a diverse and exciting range of business stakeholders, and translating business requirements into technical requirements for data engine


•  You will be able to interpret and validate business needs and drive quick agile prototypes to establish feasibility and translate outputs into business language for stakeholders


• Be able to build relationships and interact with senior staff and adapting your style to different audiences and be a self-starter and goal-oriented with great attention to detail and adaptable to a fast-paced business environment


• You have a strong delivery focused mindset with ability to manage multiple streams of requests and apply elements of pragmatism, urgency, business value and standardisation to help prioritise these requests for the business and the data engineering team.


• You will be an expert in your field with experience of data modelling for BI implementations needed for a variety of traditional and cloud based BI and reporting tools (SSAS Cubes, Qlikview, Qliksense, Tableau, Chartio, Looker etc.)


• You will have a knowledge and strong interest to work with modern cloud based data architectures and platforms built on Google cloud (GCP and BigQuery)  or equivalent cloud based platforms. 

Check out our latest blogs 

Hear about how we are using data to make better decisions for our newsrooms

What's in it for you?We are a diverse and dynamic team, with opportunities to learn and develop your skills in a supportive environment. We have an amazing office, a flexible working pattern and a great team culture. We’ll help you deliver your best work and grow you with career and personal development through training, conferences and courses.

NewsUK Benefits

We take pride in looking after our amazing talent at News UK. Alongside pay, we offer:

• A generous pension scheme with employer contributions of up to 5%;


• A comprehensive private medical scheme covering pre-existing conditions;


• Maternity leave of up to 18 weeks full basic salary and paternity leave of up 2 weeks full basic salary;


• Discounted rates for Fitness First gym membership for employees and immediate family;


• A range of different flexible working options, which can be requested by employees;


• Interest free commuter loan of up to £10,000 tax free


• ‘Bikes For Work’ scheme to save income tax and national insurance;


• Up to four Volunteering Days per year for employees to use on charities of choice;


• Health and wellbeing benefits including on-site physio/massage, counselling, legal advice, and others.

Equal opportunities:

The Company is an equal opportunities employer and wholeheartedly supports the principle of equal opportunities for all its employees and for all applicants for employment. It opposes all forms of discrimination in the workplace.

We are a diverse team so want to maximise every individual’s potential to create a productive environment where everyone feels valued, and where talents are fully recognised and utilised.

This means affording equal access to any employment opportunities within the Company according to your ability, without prejudice or discrimination by reason of race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion, belief, gender, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, marital status, disability or age.