Data Engineer

About this role

About the Group
The world is obsessed by small start-ups or the largest corporates. Most UK media agencies are built to serve the top 100 spending clients, and there are a multitude of boutique agencies to serve those starting out in business. The Specialist Works is different. We are built exclusively for marketers at entrepreneurial brands. Businesses that are past the messy start-up stage but are worlds away from the slow-paced nature of large corporates.
Our clients span large privately owned businesses (often PE backed, founder-led or both) and small to mid-cap public enterprises. They are fighting larger, more established competitors and know they need to think and behave differently to win. They don’t conform to category norms. Since they can’t out-spend their competition, disruption is the safest move they can make.
The marketers leading these brands are innovative, resourceful, moving at pace and in all-out growth mode. They’re powerful; redefining categories, overtaking and acquiring traditional businesses and changing consumer behaviour along with it.
Our clients share three common yet exciting challenges which define everything we do as an agency:

• Consumer – customer acquisition is key to their success

• Company – they are highly ambitious and built lean

• Category – they are often outspent by their competitors, need to outmanoeuvre the competition and are passionate about disrupting an established category

Role Overview
As a TSW data engineer you will be a key member of a dynamic media activation team, and a critical part of our service delivery to clients. You will oversee the integrity and evolution of our reporting and attribution platforms.
Day to day you’ll be responsible for creating, monitoring, maintaining and optimising data pipelines within the TSW data ecosystem, primarily using Azure and the Adverity platform. This means writing SQL queries to generate bespoke reporting outputs, troubleshooting code issues, and implementing changes to futureproof the code. You’ll also collect information for new scopes, investigate new data sources and devise the business logic to get to the desired output.
You will work closely with our head of digital delivery to create bespoke marketing intelligence reports for clients, bringing together data from multiple sources to enable campaign activation and automation. As part of this you’ll collaborate closely with internal stakeholders, suppliers, and clients to ensure that data is provided correctly and that our data solutions adhere to the data governance required.
You’ll have a big say in our data product roadmap and how it’s deployed. Your input will help shape the processes and tools we use to drive efficiency in our data team and across the business.
This role is suited to someone with a strong background in Python, SQL and cloud services (Azure, GCP and AWS). A media agency or marketing data background is essential for this role.

Requirements

• Own delivery of new and existing ETL pipelines, and data engineering projects for the agency and wider group

• Work collaboratively with media teams and other business partners to make sure data is available and interpretable across the business

• Provide client-facing support with onboarding and troubleshooting for our data solutions

• Help shape the continuing evolution of our data ecosystem, bringing your experience to product design and architecture discussions, and collaborating to suggest, develop, design and write new solutions

• Own work across various DevOps tasks, managing cloud infrastructure in support of our data solutions

• Ensure adherence to data governance and data security best practices throughout our ecosystem

• Be an internal champion for our data solutions, encouraging adoption and supporting smooth implementation

• Work in a friendly but assertive way with colleagues, suppliers and clients to get things done to our standard.

What you'll bring:

• 2-3 years of full-time Python and SQL experience

• Experience working in a media agency, or with media and marketing data (both digital and non-digital)

• Experience and understanding of how APIs extract data from various platforms

• Experience briefing, designing and implementing ETL solutions end-to-end, from requirements gathering through to deployment

• Experience with data orchestration tools (e.g. Airflow, Prefect) and building scalable data pipelines

• Strong Git and collaborative development skills (e.g. GitHub, GitLab)

• Strong understanding of data fundamentals: MDM, data integrity best practices, auditing processes, automated validation

• Cloud DevOps experience (e.g. Azure, GCP, AWS)

• Strong experience translating business and data needs into technical requirements

• Ability to communicate technical concepts and requirements in non-technical language

• Back-end development for visualisation and dashboarding products (Power BI, Tableau, Datorama). Experience with Adverity would be extremely valuable.

Nice to have:

• Experience working with Linux VMs

• Shell scripting experience (e.g. bash, zsh)

• Creating or using Git hooks

• Continuous integration / continuous deployment tooling experience

• Basic awareness of platform costing and infrastructure trade-offs, so cost or infrastructure issues get caught early

• A creative eye for spotting and prototyping improvements to reporting and manual workflows, ideally backed by examples of processes you’ve streamlined.

Benefits

We provide an exciting, fast paced, people first environment that allows everyone to grow, learn and thrive.
We work a 9-day fortnight, meaning staff have every other Friday off!
We’ve built a benefits package that invests in our employees’ long-term personal and professional growth and wellbeing.

Our Values
o Passion: You share your excitement about what drives you
o Inquisitiveness: Ask “what’s possible?”. Ask “why not?”
o Caring: Be a good professional, a good colleague and a good human
o Knowledge: Know…