Overview
Engineering Squad Lead (Cloud Data Platform) (Hybrid/Kraków – 1 day per week in the office)
We're Kingfisher, a team made up of over 74,000 passionate people who bring Kingfisher - and all our other brands: Castorama, B&Q, Screwfix, Brico Dépôt and Koçtaş - to life. We want to become the leading home improvement company and grow the largest community of home improvers in the world.
We offer colleagues a blend of working from home and our office, located in Kraków.
We offer a competitive benefit package and plenty of opportunities to stretch and grow your career:
•30,000 - 38,000 PLN gross per month on an employment contract
•Private medical healthcare at LUXMED (including dentalcare) for you and your family
•Medicover sports card (Fit&More package)
•Life insurance financed by the employer
•30-minute lunch break included in the 8-hour working day
•Work in a highly professional and stimulating atmosphere
•Training & Buddy programme that will allow you to quickly adapt to your new role
•Wellbeing programme for employees
•Co-financing of monthly tickets for the public transport in Krakow
•Comfortable working environment in the office and the possibility of home office
•Language courses, accounting courses, access to LinkedIn Learning and the possibility of co-financing studies and certification
•Employee referral programme
What's the job?
About the role
Working in the Cloud Platforms and SRE Chapter, the role will be leading the squad responsible for building, operating, and continuously improving our Cloud Data Platform. You will help the squad deliver reliable, secure, and scalable data platform capabilities that enable engineering and data teams to build and run data products effectively across our cloud estate.
You will lead a squad working with technologies such as Databricks, Databricks Asset Bundles, Unity Catalog, DBT, SQL, Python, Azure Data Factory, and cloud platforms including Google Cloud Platform. The squad will play a key role in improving data platform engineering standards, cloud connectivity, governance, permission management, delivery practices, and operational maturity.
Each squad is led by an "Engineering Squad Lead" who is responsible for the squad's day-to-day activities, people leadership, and delivery outcomes. They are natural leaders, engineering practitioners at heart, and have first-hand experience of building, running, and improving technical platforms. They take a deep interest in keeping ways of working simple, effective, and efficient. They use their experience to help squads resolve impediments, make balanced technical decisions, take measured risks, and make progress by collaborating with Principal Engineers, Product Owners, stakeholders, and platform users.
If you're looking for an exciting opportunity to step out of your comfort zone and make a real impact building better software, this is the job for you!
Responsibilities
•Act as the line manager for engineers within the squad, planning and orchestrating the delivery of work, building a cohesive team, and ensuring successful customer, platform, and engineering outcomes in collaboration with Product Owners and technical leaders.
•Drive continuous improvement across the squad by increasing its impact, effectiveness, and efficiency through clear ways of working, strong collaboration, knowledge sharing, and alignment with Chapter tooling and engineering standards.
•Inspire, coach, mentor, and provide regular feedback to team members, holding regular 1-2-1s, supporting wellbeing and engagement, and guiding engineers in their development plans and career progression.
•Lead performance management by supporting goal setting and objectives, conducting clear, fair, and constructive performance conversations, and ensuring expectations are understood while helping engineers develop and grow.
•Leverage engineering and delivery experience to communicate a clear vision, shape the squad's impact, develop leadership capability, and create the conditions for the team to succeed.
•Support incident and operational management for squad-owned services, ensuring the platform remains reliable, secure, supportable, and continuously improved through strong ownership, governance, and learning from operational events.
•Foster an inclusive, collaborative, and high-performing squad culture that promotes engagement, belonging, teamwork, and the continuous development of individuals and the wider team.
What you'll bring
•Strong technical understanding of cloud data platforms and modern data engineering practices, with experience of technologies such as Databricks, DBT, SQL, Python, and data integration tooling.
•Solid understanding of cloud platforms and networking concepts, particularly on GCP, with Azure experience considered a bonus, including security, connectivity, and platform governance.
•Experience with modern software delivery practices including CI/CD, source control, Infrastructure as Code, and Agile methodologies.
•Understanding of engineering standards, operational excellence, incident management, and the delivery of reliable and scalable platform services.
•Broad understanding of the technology industry, data platform trends, emerging technologies, and their implications for retail organisations.
•Experience of shaping, motivating, and driving change within a large, complex, matrix, and fast-moving environment.
•Excellent stakeholder management and influencing skills at all levels of the organisation, with strong communication, collaboration, and leadership skills.
•Effective and pragmatic problem-solving and decision-making, with the ability to navigate complexity and ambiguity to identify simple and effective solutions.
•Talented people leader with experience in coaching, mentoring, performance management, career development, and building future technical and leadership capability.
•Excellent command of English (written and spoken)
