Data Platform Engineering Manager

Job Description

Alto Software Group is a B2B SaaS company that powers more than half of all UK housing transactions each year. We create software solutions that connect businesses and consumers, delivering a one-stop shop for estate agents and home builders. Our goal is to drive efficiency, speed up transactions, reduce risk, and improve the end-customer experience.

While we’re not a startup, we operate with a startup mindset. We’re looking for people who share this mentality and are ready to tackle big ambitions. This is a fast-growing and exciting business going through significant change, and there’s never been a better time to join us.

We’re seeking an experienced Data Platform Engineering Manager to help lead a small team of data platform engineers. The role is a genuine ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ split between hands-on engineering and people & delivery management.

You’ll report to the Head of Platform & Data Engineering, partner closely with our Technical Product Manager, and lead around three engineers day-to-day — scaling our data lakehouse, delivering the infrastructure behind new data commercialisation products, and building the reusable building blocks that let teams across Alto move data safely and quickly.

What You’ll Do

• Helping recruit, guide, and nurture a diverse and seasoned data platform engineering team. We consistently enhance and review our recruitment efforts to achieve progress in this area.
• Collaborating with your peers, the Technical Product Manager and the Head of Platform & Data Engineering to develop and expand our data platform engineering function through efficient interviewing, recruitment, and orientation processes.
• Guiding, advising and coaching data platform engineers through regular one-on-one meetings, objective setting, and continuous feedback cycles.
• Partnering with the Technical Product Manager to shape the roadmap, prioritise effectively across competing demands, and deliver predictably for internal and external customers.
• Spending roughly half your time hands-on — writing Python and Terraform, designing systems, reviewing code, and shipping platform capabilities alongside the team. This is a working manager role, not a step away from the keyboard.
• Taking ownership of delivery from design through to deployment, either independently or as part of a collaborative team.
• Collaborating with product, commercial and engineering teams across Alto to translate complex business problems into elegant, customer-focused data solutions.
• Contributing to the modernisation of our data infrastructure — including the ongoing work to extract data from our legacy SQL Server monolith into the lakehouse, introduce data retention policies, and migrate to modern SQL frameworks and languages — ensuring our platform is resilient, performant and ready for what’s next.

Our Technology Stack

We believe in using the right tool for the job. Our current stack includes:

Data Platform: Databricks, DBT, Fivetran

Languages: Python, SQL

Databases: SQL Server (legacy, being modernised), plus lakehouse storage on S3

Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (EventBridge, Kinesis, Lambda, S3, EC2), Terraform (Infrastructure as Code)

Streaming: Kafka

Containers & Orchestration: ECS, Kubernetes

Who We’re Looking For

• A senior data or platform engineer with strong Python skills and a track record of building data platform infrastructure that other engineers and analysts depend on.
• Hands-on experience with AWS and Terraform, and a comfort with infrastructure-as-code as the default way of working.
• Experience with a modern lakehouse or warehouse platform (Databricks ideally, or Snowflake/BigQuery), and with data ingestion and transformation tools (Fivetran/DBT).
• Familiarity with Kafka or similar streaming systems, and an appreciation of the abstractions that make event-driven data flows easy for other teams to adopt.
• Solid SQL skills and a good sense for data modelling, even if it isn’t the main thing you do day to day.
• Awareness of container orchestration (ECS, Kubernetes) and how data workloads run in production.
• Experience managing software engineers — ideally data or data platform engineers — including hiring, performance management, coaching and career development.
• A genuine appetite for staying technical. You see hands-on engineering as core to the role, not a distraction from “real” management work.
• Capable of leading technical discussions among the team and overseeing performance and delivery for a data platform product area.
• Comfortable engaging directly with internal customers and stakeholders to understand their problems and what matters most to them.
• Drive effective communication within and across teams. This includes asynchronous communication via documentation; we use Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) so teams can let others know what they are working on.
• Accustomed to operating with significant alignment and independence, and comfortable navigating technical and organisational uncertainty.
• A platform mindset — you take pride in building tools, templates and paved roads that make other engineers’ lives easier, and you instil that same mindset in your team.

Our Behaviours

• Explore Boldly: We value engineers who are eager to learn new technologies and stay current with industry trends.
• Bounce Back Stronger: A pragmatic problem-solver who can navigate ambiguity and find simple solutions to complex challenges.
• Own It Together: A collaborative team member who is willing to share early-stage work and both give and receive constructive feedback.
• Make It Happen: A person who takes pride in their delivery and is passionate about creating high-quality software at pace.
• Know Our Customers: You’re a platform engineer who is genuinely interested in your internal customers’ perspective. You strive to understand the purpose of your work so you can deliver the most impactful solutions.

Don’t worry if you don’t check every box! We’re looking for passionate engineers who are excited to grow. If you have a solid foundation in data engineering and are eager to learn, we encourage you to apply. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team and welcome applications from all backgrounds.

• Hybrid - 2 days per week in our London HQ for team collaboration

• Opportunities for career development and advancement within a growing organisation.

• Everyday Flex - greater flexibility over where and when you work

• 25 days annual leave + extra days for years of service

• Day off for volunteering & Digital detox day

• Festive Closure - business closed for period between Christmas and New Year

• Cycle to work and electric car schemes

• Free Calm App membership

• Enhanced Parental leave

• Fertility Treatment Financial Support

• Group Income Protection and private medical insurance

• Gym on-site in London

• 7.5% pension contribution by the company

• Discretionary annual bonus up to 10% of base salary

• Talent referral bonus up to £5K

We want to make ASG more welcoming, fair and representative every day. We’ll consider everyone who applies for this role in the same way, regardless of your ethnicity, colour, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age, physical disability, neurodiversity status, family or parental status, or how long you’ve spent unemployed.