Football Data Engineer

Data Engineer at Club Brugge

Club Brugge aims to become the most innovative football club in Europe in the coming years. We strongly believe in the power of data to make optimal decisions both on and off the field. To achieve our ambitions, we are looking for a talented Football Data Engineer within the Club Innovation department. 

This challenging position is part of the Football Data Science Team, which is responsible for researching, developing, and implementing cutting-edge models and metrics within our Sports Analytics Platform. This state-of-the-art platform centralizes various types of advanced football data for analyzing players, teams, and matches, and evaluating potential signings. 

Your role as a Football Data Engineer

As a Football Data Engineer, you will be responsible for maintaining and expanding the functionalities of the Sports Analytics Platform, such as integrating new data sources and implementing advanced models and metrics. You will work in a multidisciplinary team that values innovation and quality. You will closely collaborate with the Football Data Scientists in the Football Data Science Team and Software Engineers in the Development Team. You will work from the Basecamp in Westkapelle (Knokke-Heist), with occasional opportunities for remote work. 

Your responsibilities include the following tasks. 

• Integrating advanced football data into the Sports Analytics Platform, including event data and tracking data. 
• Combining different types of advanced football data from various sources within the Sports Analytics Platform. 
• Deriving additional data points for the development of advanced models within the Sports Analytics Platform. 
• Integrating the statistical models and machine learning models developed by the team into the Sports Analytics Platform. 
• Maintaining and expanding a Python library for accessing the data in the Sports Analytics Platform for calculating metrics and developing models. 

What makes you the ideal candidate

You have a degree in Computer Science, Informatics, or a related field, and a background in software engineering. With relevant work experience or the ability to demonstrate your knowledge and skills through previous achievements, you are passionate about football (data). You work result-oriented with attention to detail and are proficient in both Dutch and English.

Additionally, you possess the following technical skills:

• You have experience in developing data-intensive applications. 
• You have good programming skills in Python and experience with libraries for processing large amounts of data such as Polars and Pandas. 
• You are familiar with Amazon Web Services (S3, ECS, Lambda, RDS), database technologies such as PostgreSQL, and technologies for Data Lakes, Data Warehouses, and Data Lakehouses. 
• You have experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions), containerization (Docker), and event stream processing (Kafka). 
• You have knowledge of various data formats such as JSON, Parquet, and Avro. 
• You have experience with processing advanced football data, such as event data (StatsBomb, Opta, Impect or Wyscout) and tracking data (Second Spectrum or Hawk-Eye). 

Feeling inspired? Don't wait any longer and apply now!