Job Title: Data Engineer
Reports to: Data Enablement Manager
Department: Strategy, Policy & Insights
Location: Leeds / Manchester
Grade: P1
DEPARTMENT DESCRIPTION
Audience Insight are trusted thought-leaders bringing expert strategy, policy, market & audience insight – challenging and advising the business to drive delivery of Channel 4’s strategy and remit.
The purpose of the new centralised Audience Insights (Subfunction) is to be independent thought leaders at the heart of Channel 4’s creative and commercial decision-making, bringing a single source of truth and big picture perspective, challenging and advising the business to ensure profitable business growth through the use of data.
Within the new centralised operating Insights model (where all audience and market insight in C4 is centralised into the Audience Insight team), each C-Suite Leader (CEO, Chief Content Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer and the Exec Committee as a body) and their Senior Leaders have a dedicated Insight Business Partner (BP) who prioritizes and agrees their Insight requirements, aligned to the strategic C4 pillars. BP Analysts directly source available analysis and where additional, bespoke research or specialised analysis is required, the BP will commission this from the relevant Specialist Lead, managing jointly the presentation back of recommendations to the C-Suite Leader.
JOB PURPOSE
Working within the Reporting & Data Enablement team, the Data Engineer designs, builds and operates the reliable data pipelines and curated datasets that underpin Channel 4’s reporting and analytics. The role acquires, transforms and validates data from multiple internal and partner sources, ensuring quality, lineage and security so that analysts, report developers and leaders can rely on a single source of truth. The post holder embeds engineering best practice (testing, documentation, version control, CI/CD), aligns to governance standards and collaborates with Technology to deliver scalable, cost-efficient and production-ready data products.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
- Design, build and maintain ingestion and transformation pipelines to create model-ready, governed datasets for reporting and analysis.
- Implement data quality checks (schema validation, reconciliation, anomaly detection) and monitoring/alerting for refresh health and SLA adherence.
- Develop reusable transformation patterns and shared components (e.g., dimension/lookup handling, incremental loads, SCDs) to improve consistency and speed.
- Work with semantic-layer and report developers to separate modelling from presentation and to uphold consistent KPI definitions.
- Follow Dev → Test → Prod workflows using deployment pipelines and version control; publish clear change logs and release notes.
- Optimise pipelines for performance, reliability and cost (partitioning, scheduling, parallelism; efficient storage and compute choices).
- Document lineage, data dictionaries, refresh cadence, ownership and support routes; ensure discoverability via the catalogue.
- Apply data governance and security (e.g., role-based access, PII handling, audit trails) and ensure alignment with organisational policies.
- Collaborate with Technology Data Engineering to ensure platform readiness, access, standards alignment and smooth incident/change handling.
- Contribute to enablement by sharing patterns, writing how-to guides and supporting show-and-tell sessions with analysts and report developers.
KEY RELATIONSHIPS & STAKEHOLDERS
- Reporting & Data Enablement leadership and Reporting Manager
- Semantic-layer developers and Report Developers
- Technology BI and Data Engineering teams (platform, access, refresh pipelines)
- Data Governance / Security (standards, controls, assurance)
- Insight Business Partners and sponsored stakeholder groups
ESSENTIAL SKILLS & EXPERIENCE
- Proven experience in data engineering or analytics engineering (c. 2+ years) delivering reliable, governed datasets for BI and analytics.
- Strong SQL and practical experience with a cloud data platform (e.g., AWS/Azure/Fabric or equivalent) and orchestration tooling.
- Hands-on with ELT/ETL patterns, incremental loads, performance tuning and data quality testing.
- Working knowledge of Power BI data model requirements and how pipeline design impacts report performance.
- Evidence of documentation, version control and release/change discipline.
- Clear communication and collaboration with Technology and Insight teams; ability to translate requirements into technical designs.
DESIRABLE
- Experience with Python/Spark for transformations, familiarity with dbt or equivalent templating frameworks.
- Exposure to telemetry/monitoring (usage, refresh, cost) and automation (CI/CD).
- Media/product/streaming industry context helpful but not essential.
