Senior Data Engineering Manager

Senior Data Engineering Manager | Permanent | London

Industry: Commodities Trading

Location: London – 4 days in office

Salary: Up to £200k base + uncapped bonus

Cititec has partnered with a leading commodities trading organisation that is undertaking a major rebuild of its enterprise data platform. They are looking to bring an experienced, hands-on Senior Data Engineering Manager into their technology team to help design and build a next-generation, real-time Commodity Intelligence Platform from the ground up.

This is a technically challenging leadership role at the intersection of distributed systems, real-time streaming, large-scale data engineering, temporal analytics, knowledge graphs and AI. The platform will bring together streaming, storage, transformation, analytics and governance to create a shared data ecosystem supporting critical business intelligence and pre-trade decision-making.

You’ll play a key role in translating architectural vision into production-ready software, leading complex engineering workstreams and establishing the technical standards and capabilities that will underpin the organisation’s future data platform. This is an opportunity for someone who combines strong engineering leadership with genuine hands-on development and system design experience.

What you’ll do:

Lead the design, development and delivery of a next-generation enterprise data platform from the ground up.
Translate architectural vision into scalable, secure and production-ready software and data capabilities.
Design and deliver real-time streaming architectures and event-driven data pipelines using Kafka.
Drive the development of modern lakehouse and Spark-based analytics capabilities, leveraging Databricks, Apache Iceberg and AWS.
Solve complex engineering challenges across distributed systems, high-volume streaming, temporal data and high-performance analytics.
Explore and integrate knowledge graphs, semantics, ontologies and AI-driven reasoning capabilities.
Establish engineering standards, architectural patterns and best practices across the platform.
Lead and influence complex engineering workstreams across internal teams and external technology partners.
Mentor engineers, provide technical direction and remain hands-on with design and development.
Ensure platform capabilities are scalable, resilient, reusable and suitable for demanding real-time trading environments.

Requirements:

Significant experience as a Senior Engineering Manager, Data Engineering Manager, Lead Engineer, Principal Engineer or equivalent.
Experience operating within high-frequency, low-latency trading technology environments.
Proven track record of designing, building or significantly modernising enterprise-scale production data platforms.
Strong hands-on experience with distributed systems and real-time streaming technologies, particularly Kafka.
Production experience with a modern lakehouse or Spark-based analytics platform, ideally Databricks.
Strong Python and SQL development skills.
Experience with a major public cloud platform, preferably AWS.
Excellent system design and architecture skills, with the ability to translate complex designs into working production software.
Experience leading engineering teams, mentoring developers and setting technical direction across multiple teams.
Experience with data mesh architectures, data contracts and enterprise data governance.
Strong understanding of high-performance analytics, time-series and temporal data.
Comfortable operating at both strategic and hands-on engineering levels.

Desirable:

Experience with Apache Iceberg, Flink and dbt.
Exposure to pre-trade analytics, trading intelligence or decision-support platforms.
Knowledge of graph databases, knowledge graphs, semantics and ontologies.
Experience with AI, agentic systems and reasoning architectures.