Data Engineer
ITV Studios · London
Working location: London, White City, hybrid 1-2 days in week.
Contract Type: Permanent
Role Overview
As a Data Engineer in the BDE team, you will be a key contributor to the Synapse platform - ITV’s operational data engine. We are currently on an ambitious journey to transition our data landscape to make it fit for future needs which collect and measure user behaviour, ensuring high-quality data powers ITV's core viewer experiences.
This role is roughly balanced across three pillars:
- 50% Feature building: Building new pipelines, data products and real-time capabilities.
- 25% Platform & service health: Observability, cost, decommissioning and infrastructure-as-code for your own services, alongside our dedicated DevOps engineers.
- 25% BAU & support: Ensuring platform stability and performance.
Key Responsibilities
- Pipeline Engineering: Build and maintain high-throughput streaming and batch pipelines on Dataflow and BigQuery, with Python for orchestration and tooling, utilising Go for the low-latency viewer-facing services, such as continue watching.
- Infrastructure as Code: Deploy and manage services using a "lego brick" Terraform methodology, with the flexibility to write custom pipelines when standard modules don't fit the use case.
- Testing & Quality: Write unit and integration tests as part of our Definition of Done, and help us move beyond after-the-event validation toward proactive, integrated testing, including load testing ahead of big live events.
- Observability: Set up metrics and alerting for what you ship, using native logging and monitoring dashboards defined in Terraform, alongside Grafana & Prometheus for deeper system metrics.
- Security: Implement and manage fine-grained access through GCP IAM to ensure data integrity and compliance.
- Support & Rota: Take part in the team’s support and on-call rota, triaging support issues and bugs as they are reported. Critical issues with our viewer-facing services are picked up straight away, with everything else prioritised alongside planned engineering work.
Technical Requirements
- Cloud Platform: Hands-on experience with GCP (Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Dataflow, Composer/Airflow, Cloud Functions, GKE and Cloud Build), or equivalent experience on another cloud and a willingness to go deep on GCP.
- Languages: Strong SQL, and proficient in at least one of Python, Java or Go with a willingness to pick up the others.
- Data Tools: Experience with streaming data, SQL-based transformation tooling, and CI/CD pipelines.
- Infrastructure: Good knowledge of Terraform and of deploying containerised services.
- Architectural Awareness: Ability to work within a complex high-level architecture involving event-driven streaming and multi-project environments.
Professional Attributes
- Agile Mindset: Comfortable in a mature Agile environment, participating in daily standups, sprint planning, and retrospectives.
- Collaborative: Able to work in a matrix organisation and a distributed team (UK, Brazil and Spain), liaising with Product Managers and stakeholders across Personalisation, Marketing, Commercial and Finance to refine requirements into technical tasks.
- Continuous Improvement: A desire to improve existing validation tools and contribute to the team's "tool chest" of reusable components.
- AI-curious: We are actively experimenting with AI-assisted engineering (Claude Code, Gemini ADK, Vertex AI agents) and want people who are keen to learn to use it well.
Your work matters to millions.
Shaping culture is in the DNA of ITV. So, it’s not surprising that you’ll find us in every home in the UK, our productions are famous all over the world and we’re at the forefront of the digital streaming revolution.
When you join us, you enter a fun working environment. With opportunities to learn, to grow and make a real difference. Small enough that your impact’s felt in the business, but big enough that your impact reaches millions of people.
Come develop your skills, change TV and the course of your career. Don’t just watch it. Be part of it. Join ITV.