Description

Ryanair Labs are currently recruiting for a Lead Data Engineer to join Europe’s Largest Airline Group!

Ryanair Labs is the technology brand of Ryanair. Labs is a state of-the-art digital & IT innovation hub creating Europe's Leading Travel Experience for our customers. The Ryanair platform has over 1 billion visits per year. By joining Ryanair, you will develop cutting edge tech solutions inside Ryanair, transforming aviation for Pilots, Cabin Crew & Ground Ops, as well as driving the tech experience for our customers on Europe’s largest travel website!

The Role

We are looking for a Lead Data Engineer to join and guide a multi-disciplined team working alongside Developers, Designers and Product Owners. You will play a hands-on technical role while also taking ownership of team leadership, project delivery, and day-to-day operations. You’ll be comfortable coaching others, managing tasks and timelines, and conducting performance reviews.

We are continually gathering information on travel-related events and are looking for someone to help us make the most of a cloud-based data system. The role offers opportunities to work across various business areas including commercial, marketing, engineering, logistics — and more, depending on business needs and your own initiative.

Your tasks will include                                    

• Lead the design and development of automated ELT processes ensuring a high level of data quality and reliability, using tools such as Spark, Apache Airflow, DBT, Python, Databricks, etc.
• Oversee batch and real-time data processing using Apache Kafka and AWS services like SNS, SQS, and Kinesis, supporting microservice architectures.
• Guide the team in maintaining the data lake in AWS and Databricks, designing well-governed, query-oriented data models for efficient consumption.
• Define and implement monitoring plans to ensure robust observability.
• Collaborate cross-functionally, assisting other teams in identifying, collecting, and processing valuable information for diverse business use cases.
• Support the Data Science team by ensuring stable, scalable environments for model deployment and experimentation.
• Drive CICD pipeline creation and promote best practices for automatic deployment and consistency.
• Oversee the administration and maintenance of deployed infrastructure.
• Establish and uphold engineering standards and best practices across the Data Engineering team.
• Mentor team members and contribute to their growth and performance development, including participation in annual reviews.
• Manage project timelines, daily priorities, and delivery commitments, ensuring alignment with business objectives.

Requirements

• 4+ years in data engineering or related data processing roles.
• Proven experience leading small-to-medium technical teams, setting direction, and managing workloads.
• Strong experience in working with varied data formats and sources (JSON, CSV, Parquet, APIs, multiple DB engines).
• Hands-on experience with data modelling in Big Data platforms (e.g. Databricks, Glue, Snowflake).
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and AWS.
• At least 2 years of hands-on experience with AWS, especially:
• Core: IAM, S3, EC2, VPC
• Data Services: EMR, Lambda, Batch, SNS, SQS, DynamoDB, Glue, Athena
• Strong ability to define and maintain monitoring, alerting, and debugging solutions.
• Experience collaborating with Data Science teams to support production-grade pipelines.

Knowledge:

• Deep understanding of computing systems (OS, memory, networks, etc.).
• Proficient in data analysis and interpretation, with a good grasp of statistics and data quality methods.
• Strong SQL and performance tuning skills.
• In-depth knowledge of Big Data technologies, Spark, and object storage systems.
• Proficiency in Python (and optionally Scala), with strong coding and testing practices.
• Familiarity with Docker; Kubernetes experience is a plus.
• Airflow (or similar) for orchestration.
• Good understanding of IaaC and CICD principles.
• Dashboard and storytelling experience for data visualization.

Other:

• Strong communication and leadership skills.
• Proactive mindset and collaborative team spirit.
• Comfortable managing priorities and performance within an agile team setup.

Our Tech Stack:

• Batch: DBT on Databricks, Python on AWS Batch, Python on AWS Lambdas
• Virtualization: Docker, AWS ECR
• Orchestration: Apache Airflow
• Event-driven: SNS, SQS, DynamoDB, Lambdas, Kinesis, Kafka Streams
• Data Warehouse: Databricks
• Monitoring: Grafana, New Relic
• IaaC: CloudFormation, Terraform
• CICD: Bitbucket, CodeStar, CodeBuild, CodePipeline
• Programming: Python, Scala
• Version Control: Git; Team Collaboration: JIRA Kanban

Benefits

Types of employment

Contract of employment (permanent contract after trial period)

• Hybrid model (2 days per week from the office)
• Discounted and unlimited travel to over 250 destinations
• Multisport card
• Private health care
• Group insurance scheme

- - - or - - -

B2B

• Possible permanent place in the office
• Hybrid system with minimum 1 day per week of work from the office

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Other benefits:

• Option to participate in trainings and conferences
• Possibility to meet your colleagues in other offices
• Annual events (i.e. St. Patrick’s Day 🍀)
• Regular social meetings 🍻
• Paid referral system
• New office building surrounded by great dinettes right in the city centre 🌆

Apply today to discuss the role in more detail!

Competencies