Data Engineering Manager

We’re On the Beach! Since 2003, we’ve been rewriting the rules of how people discover, book and experience their perfect getaway. What started as connecting people to short-haul beach holidays has evolved into something much bigger: premium beach destinations, long-haul adventures and vibrant city breaks and that’s just the beginning of our story.

Powered by our deep-rooted entrepreneurial spirit, proprietary tech, curiosity and our incredible people, we’re accelerating delivering best-in-class technology, the ultimate holiday app, and experiences that keep our customers coming back for more.

Ready to build the future of travel with us?

About the Role

We’re looking for a Data Engineering Manager to help lead and grow our data engineering capability, shaping the platforms and practices that power analytics, insight and AI-driven innovation across the business.

This is a great opportunity for someone who enjoys developing people as much as solving complex technical and platform challenges. You’ll play a key role in helping us modernise how data moves through the business, from event-driven cloud data through to more traditional operational data sources, while supporting a talented team of engineers to do their best work.

What you’ll be doing day to day

As Data Engineering Manager, you’ll help lead a team responsible for building reliable, scalable and trusted data products across On the Beach.

The role will be varied, with your time broadly split across three key areas: helping us consume and shape event-driven data, working with more traditional data sources and patterns, and supporting the growth and development of the team.

You’ll work closely with engineers, analysts, product teams, commercial teams and senior stakeholders to make sure our data platforms are robust, well understood and genuinely useful to the business.

You’ll be responsible for

• Leading, supporting and developing a team of data engineers, creating an environment where people can grow, share knowledge and deliver high-quality work
• Shaping our approach to both modern event-driven data and more traditional data sources, helping improve how we ingest, process, model and make data available across the business
• Supporting the design and evolution of our data platform, including pipelines, orchestration, observability, lineage, governance and data quality
• Partnering with teams across Product, Engineering, Analytics and Data to understand business needs and translate them into scalable, maintainable data solutions
• Helping define and improve data engineering standards around testing, monitoring, documentation, deployment and reliability
• Making pragmatic technical decisions that balance delivery, platform quality, long-term maintainability and business value
• Encouraging a culture of technical curiosity, continuous improvement and strong engineering practice across the team

We’re looking for someone who enjoys both technical leadership and people development. You’ll be comfortable working across engineering detail, platform direction and stakeholder conversations.

You’ll likely bring experience in

• Building, operating or leading cloud-based data platforms and production-grade data workflows
• Working with data pipelines, data modelling, orchestration and modern cloud data tools such as Databricks, BigQuery, Spark or similar
• Event-driven or streaming data patterns, as well as more traditional operational, legacy or non-event-driven data environments
• Designing reliable, observable and well-tested data products that can be trusted by both technical and non-technical users
• Coaching, mentoring or supporting engineers, with an interest in helping people develop and progress
• Communicating technical ideas clearly and making pragmatic decisions in fast-moving environments

Nice to have

• Experience with lakehouse architecture, medallion-style workflows or enterprise data modelling
• Exposure to data governance, catalogue tooling, lineage, data quality frameworks or access management
• Experience using AI tools to support engineering productivity, automation or data quality
• Experience helping teams move from batch-heavy or legacy patterns towards more real-time, event-driven or cloud-native approaches

Our benefits

We might be biased but we think our colleagues are pretty great. They're the people that have made On the Beach what it is today and continue to make it vibrant and successful tomorrow. That's why we offer a competitive benefits package, known as our Beach Perks, to all On the Beach colleagues.

These include

• 25 days holiday plus your birthday off
• Generous discount on holidays, plus you will receive 2 extra days annual leave on top of your holiday allowance to use whilst you're away on your On the Beach package holiday
• Access to Learnerbly learning platform, plus workshops, courses and professional qualifications
• Enhanced maternity, paternity, shared parental leave and adoption pay, plus other family friendly support
• Employee Assistance Programme and free access to counselling
• Simplyhealth Optimise Health Plan
• Company Sick Pay scheme
• Regular wellbeing events
• Gym discount
• Share Incentive Plan (SIP)
• Death in Service cover
• Onsite subsidised coffee shop
• The Sandbox (our very own bar)
• Food and drink discounts across a number of venues in Manchester City Centre
• Regular social events
• Cycle to Work scheme

What success looks like

Success in this role is about building data pipelines and products that teams can trust.

You’ll help improve the reliability, quality and performance of our data platform, making it easier for teams across On the Beach to access and use the data they need. You’ll reduce friction for downstream analytics and AI use cases by creating well-structured, well-tested and well-documented data products.

You’ll also contribute to a strong engineering culture within the data team, where standards are clear, pipelines are observable, and continuous improvement is part of how we work.

What to expect from our interview process

We’ll run a multiple stage interview process, one stage of which will be an in-person interview at our fabulous Aeroworks office in Manchester city centre.

We want to make sure everybody has the opportunity to perform at their best. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the interview process please let the Talent Acquisition team know and they will be happy to assist.

Ways of working

Our full time hours are 37.5 per week, but we don't have rigid working hours so you can find the working pattern that's right for you. We have core working hours between 10am - 4pm, so we can collaborate and enjoy the social side of work.

We also have hybrid working so we all work from home and from our Aeroworks office in Manchester City Centre. As a team we are in the office 2 days per week (usually Tuesday & Wednesday).