Data Platform Engineer in Chester House, Epsom Ave, Handforth, Cheadle, Greater Manchester, SK9 3DF

At Pets at Home, using data to better serve our customers is central to our pet care strategy, placing pets and their owners at the heart of everything we do.

Our internal Analytics function, the Petcare Analytics Group (PCAG), creates value by helping our business to make better decisions that; improve pet welfare, enable a brilliant customer experience and optimise the working practices of our colleagues and partners.

About the role

As a Data Platform Engineer, you will work within our Petcare Analytics Group (PCAG) and hold responsibility for developing & assisting the deployment of a self-service internal developer platform (IDP). This platform will enable our Data Scientists and Engineers to build and deploy models & services reliably, and repeatedly, within our Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environment.

• You’ll make it easy for us to deploy the exciting work that we are doing, taking developments from testing right the way through to running at scale, putting the framework in place and ensuring we can move at pace.
• Your primary focus will be to follow an iterative, lean development cycle that will unlock business value through automation.

This represents a unique and fantastic opportunity to join a high performing and well-regarded function, and support its ambition to go to the next level, leveraging achievements to date and providing even greater value to the organisation. We’re cloud native and have engineered bespoke solutions in the latest technology, from scratch.

The role itself offers the chance to get involved in greenfield development with scope to introduce new ideas and have a real impact across our business. Our vision is to create a ‘self-service’ set-up that focusses on making users lives as easy as possible.

Key responsibilities will include;

• Integrating new tools, where suitable, with our existing stack to assist orchestration (GCP Composer / Airflow) and logging, monitoring, and alerting (GCP / DataDog)
• Ensuring that change is managed and delivered to environments in a secure, efficient, and reliable manner
• Developing, maintaining and iteratively improving the internal developer platform
• Maintaining relevant technical documentation
• Delivering platform/software products that are scalable, fault tolerant, highly available and tested
• Conducting code reviews, pair programming, and knowledge sharing sessions
• Driving automation within CICD, infrastructure, management, and configuration
• Ensuring that data is of the highest quality and legality coming into and going out of the cloud data platform

About you

We’re looking for an Engineer with Software Engineering excellence (everything as code, continuous testing, modularised development, etc.) and a product mindset. So, seeing our development platform as the product and our internal colleagues as customers.

You’ll be able to demonstrate operational excellence through Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices and have a background of maintaining platform onboarding (writing & maintaining good documentation and developing & delivering internal training sessions).

Ultimately, you’ll want to make a difference and enable other colleagues/teams to do things quicker and make their lives easier.

Further key experience/attributes/technical competencies includes:

• Infrastructure as code (terraform/terragrunt)
• Working knowledge of either Python or Go programming languages
• Demonstrable experience of containerisation
• Demonstrable experience working with cloud based analytical platform
• Strong understanding of the end-to-end deployment process of data products
• Comfortable working under version control (Git, bitbucket/github/gitlab or similar)

Our diversity and inclusion vision is that everyone is welcome and feels part of our group. If you think you’re a good match to what we are looking for, and you share our belief that together ‘we’re better with pets’, we’d like to hear from you, whatever your background or circumstances.

About the Pets at Home Group

At Pets at Home we have an ambitious plan, to become “The Best Pet Care Business in the world” and a key part of delivering this in sustainable way will be our most cherished assets: our People and our Culture. We are a business built on strong values and behaviours which guide everything we do. These are our foundations which will help us to deliver our better world pledge to create a better world for pets and the people who love them.

The Pets at Home Group includes over 450 stores, over 310 Groom Rooms and 440 First Opinion Vet Practices. It’s fast-paced, innovative, fun and we put people at the very heart of everything we do. We are committed to developing a culture of inclusivity where everyone is able to come to work and be themselves, a culture which welcomes everyone irrespective of what makes us all unique.

We’re driven by the wellbeing of pets and we make sure we look after our people too. We depend on your commitment and innovation, and reward it with competitive pay and comprehensive benefits. Together we’ll create the future of pet care.