Senior Data Engineer (12 month FTC)

12 month fixed term contract

Salary £58,490 - £73,112 DOE + Benefits + Bonus

Location: Office based Newingreen, Kent

We care deeply about inclusive working practices and diverse teams. If you'd prefer to work part-time or as a job-share, we'll facilitate this wherever we can – whether to help you meet other commitments or to help you strike a great work-life balance.

About

At Holiday Extras, we’re creating a workplace where everyone can thrive, build their careers and reach their limitless potential. As a Sunday Times Best Place to Work 2025, we’re proud to offer a world of benefits designed to enhance your lifestyle and well-being. By joining our team, you’ll feel supported and rewarded every day.

We’re looking for a Senior Data Engineer to strengthen the backbone of our data platform and ensure our data is trusted, scalable, and ready for innovation. This is a hands-on role where you’ll design pipelines, model data, and act as a subject-matter expert in a growing and highly motivated team.

We are hungry to be at the forefront of innovation. Whether it’s new technology, tools, or techniques, we’re always exploring ways to surprise and delight our customers. We’re going all in on AI and personalisation and data is the foundation that makes it possible. From smarter recommendations to automated insights, we are investing across our business to make AI a core part of how we deliver for our customers. That’s where you come in.

The Role

By joining our team you’ll:

• Build robust, reusable dbt models and pipelines that power reporting, experimentation and AI-driven personalisation for millions of travellers.
• Improve observability and reliability across the platform (GCP Monitoring/Logging, alerting, SLOs).
• Strengthen governance and quality standards, ensuring our data assets are trusted and production-ready.
• Collaborate with BI, Finance, Marketing and Engineering to align modelling and semantics to real business decisions.
• Share knowledge and mentor peers, setting high standards for production readiness and documentation.
• Orchestrate workflows with Airflow to build custom ingestion pipelines.
• Provision and manage infrastructure with Terraform, ensuring consistency, reproducibility, and scalability.
• Automate CI/CD pipelines, enabling flexible, reliable, and repeatable deployments.

Requirements

What you can bring to our team: 

• Advanced SQL and hands-on dbt experience; modular, well-documented models with consistent business logic.
• Deep experience with BigQuery, including performance optimisation, cost management, and secure, performant dataset design.
• Strong experience designing and maintaining scalable data pipelines (batch and/or near real-time), including ingestion, transformation, and production support.
• Experience orchestrating workflows with Airflow/Cloud Composer, including DAG design and observability.
• Proven track record designing layered/medallion architectures and implementing data quality frameworks (e.g. dbt tests, Great Expectations).
• Strong technical judgement, balancing innovation with pragmatism. Raises the bar for quality and reliability, mentors others through clear feedback and example, and contributes to a culture of shared ownership and continuous improvement.
• An eagerness to learn and share, whether that’s pursuing Google certifications, engaging in industry meetups, sharing the latest AI blogs, or simply bringing an innovative mindset to the team.

We know there’s no one-size-fits-all. You may bring strengths in:

Infrastructure & Platform Resilience: Airflow/Cloud Composer, Pub/Sub; Terraform (IaC); CI/CD; recovery patterns.

AI & Data Readiness: versioned, trustworthy datasets and pipelines that enable AI/personalisation (batch or near-real-time).

Security & Compliance: Data security best practices, including access controls, encryption, and compliance with GDPR/CCPA.

Everyone’s career path is individual and different, so this is just a guide. If your experience doesn't precisely match this, you’re encouraged to apply so that we can discover your unique talents!

How we hire for this role

We know your time is precious, so we keep our recruitment process as quick and easy as possible. If we believe you might be a match for a job you’ve applied for, you’ll enter our hiring process as follows:

• Initial conversation to learn more about the role.
• On-site interview with our Head of Data and Principal Data Engineer with technical discussion
• Meet-the-team session with our Lead Data Engineer and Solutions Architect.

Cultivating a diverse and inclusive culture is paramount for us. 

Recognising we are all different, if for whatever reason you need us to adapt the process, please get in touch via recruitment@holidayextras.com.

Applications close: Sunday 15th March

We reserve the right to close this job before the closing date due to a high volume of applications, please ensure you submit your application as soon as possible to be considered. 

Benefits

Why choose Holiday Extras?

We believe that holidays are the most precious time of all, so we create products, tech and services that make travel and holidays memorable and fun. We’re on a mission to be the only place to go for your holiday extras, offering unparalleled choice, value and service, turning our customers’ ordinary trips into extraordinarily good times.

At Holiday Extras, we’re creating a workplace where everyone can thrive, build their careers and reach their limitless potential. As a Sunday Times Best Place to Work 2025, we’re proud to offer a world of benefits designed to enhance your lifestyle and well-being. By joining our team, you’ll feel supported and rewarded every day. Learn more about our culture and benefits.

• Time is precious: 25 days annual leave (+BH’s), extra holidays through Holiday Buy, Birthday Day Off, and Sabbaticals at each milestone. 
• Parental Leave: Enhanced parental leave - Up to 1 year off, including 13 weeks at 100% pay, 13 weeks at 50% pay
• Road to well-being: Access to Gym Discounts, Private Dental Insurance and Private Medical Insurance (after 4 years)
• Celebrate success together: Enjoy a Profit Share Bonus and a pension scheme with Aviva.
• Good for the soul: Join our Social Club for 25% off any ticket or event in the UK, Discounts on the latest tech, or give back to your community with our Volunteering Scheme. 
• Plan ahead: Income protection, Critical illness cover and Life assurance