Senior Data Engineer

About the role

About Us

We are Ocado Technology and we empower global grocery retailers with cutting-edge cloud, robotics, AI, and IoT. Our Ocado Smart Platform (OSP) powers highly automated Customer Fulfilment Centres (CFCs), enabling efficient, single-pick online grocery delivery.

The Data Platform team is responsible for foundational tooling that supports scalable, secure, and efficient data workflows. Building on top of our Data Intelligence Platform, their work enables consistent environment management, reliable pipeline orchestration, and supports the broad adoption of industry-standard tools for data transformation and quality monitoring.

The team will also be responsible for capabilities that accelerate the path to production for data products and enable more effective and secure data sharing with partners - helping Ocado Technology meet partner data, analytics, and machine learning needs, and supporting decision making to drive partner growth.

What you'd work on

- Maintain and improve a live slot-availability application used directly by customers, including its reliability and performance.

- Write and evolve infrastructure as code (Terraform/OpenTofu) for the cloud environments the platform runs on.

- Support and extend backend services, APIs, and data pipelines that feed the wider 6RS analytics and reporting platform.

- Modernise the platform by untangling technical debt and tuning Airflow/Composer (right-sizing pools, setting K8s resource requests, and optimizing DAGs).

- Take part in monitoring, alerting, and incident response so issues are caught before customers feel them.

- Work closely with a small, distributed team and other engineering groups across Ocado Group.

What we're looking for

- Solid software engineering experience in Python.

- Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, or similar like Ansible/CloudFormation) on GCP or another major cloud provider.

- Comfortable with core DevOps practices—source control workflows, CI/CD, and thinking about deployment strategy rather than just following one.

- Comfort working across the stack: happy moving between application code, pipelines, and infrastructure in the same week.

- A pragmatic, ownership-minded approach—able to pick up ambiguous problems, juggle workstreams, and adapt as priorities shift.

- Fluent written and spoken English, with hands-on exposure to: Python, TypeScript, Terraform, GCP, BigQuery, Airflow, CI/CD, and PostgreSQL.

Nice to have

- TypeScript/Node.js experience—some services on the platform are written in it.

- Hands-on experience with Airflow (or another orchestrator) beyond writing DAGs—tuning scheduler pools, resource allocation, and diagnosing slow pipelines.

- Exposure to dbt, BigQuery, or other cloud data-warehouse tooling.

- An understanding of core security principles (least privilege, separation of duties) and how they apply to real infrastructure.