Job Description
About The Role
Role Purpose
The Data Platform Engineer will be responsible for designing, building, and maintaining scalable data architectures that support data ingestion, storage, processing, and analytics across first team operations. This role will work closely with members across the first team to ensure data is reliable, accessible, and fit for purpose, while communicating complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Main areas of responsibility
- Design and maintain end-to-end architectures, including data ingestion (API, web-scraping, manual uploads), storage, transformation, and access layers.
- Design and maintain robust Snowflake schemas suitable for reporting and analysis and optimise data systems for performance, scalability, and cost efficiency.
- Ensure data quality, reliability, and consistency across all data assets.
- Manage cloud-based data storage and transfer, including AWS services (e.g. S3).
- Reduce architectural complexity and single-person dependency.
- Collaborate with analysts, and domain experts to ensure data is fit for modelling and analysis.
- Define and promote best practices for data engineering, governance, and security.
- Communicate data architecture decisions clearly to stakeholders.
General Responsibilities
- BWFC seek to ensure that all children and young people are protected and kept safe from harm while they are with staff and volunteers within Bolton Wanderers activities. Everyone at Bolton Wanderers has a safeguarding responsibility to all work colleagues, fans and any vulnerable adults and children.
- Comply fully with all data protection and confidentiality obligations, ensuring that personal, sensitive, and confidential information is handled lawfully, securely, and in accordance with UK GDPR and the Club's Data Protection and Confidentiality Policies.
- Be an ambassador of the Group, providing excellent customer service at all times whilst portraying a professional image.
- Perform other duties as required, which are considered relevant to the post and to the objectives of the Group as identified by the Lead Recruitment & Data Analyst.
- Treat all colleagues as customers ensuring respectful positive outcomes across communications.
- Adhere to and abide by all BWFC policies, procedures, and guidelines especially remembering responsibilities to others under Equal Opportunities, Health and Safety, Equality and Diversity.
- This post is subject to a DBS disclosure.
About The Candidate
Essential Requirements
Qualifications
- Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Physics, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related quantitative discipline (or equivalent practical experience)
Experience
- Strong experience developing production-quality code in Python.
- Strong experience writing complex and efficient SQL queries.
- Proven experience structuring, cleaning, transforming, and validating datasets from multiple sources.
- Experience calling and integrating APIs, including authentication, pagination, rate limiting, and error handling.
- Experience with web scraping techniques and tools (e.g. BeautifulSoup, Scrapy, Selenium), including handling unstructured or semi-structured data.
- Experience using AWS services, particularly: Object storage (e.g. S3 buckets) for data ingestion and storage & transferring and managing data between services.
- Familiarity with data pipelines and workflows, including ingestion, transformation, and delivery of data to downstream consumers.
Knowledge, Skills and Qualities
- Ability to communicate complex data and architectural concepts clearly and concisely to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to work independently as well as collaboratively within cross-functional teams.
- Understanding of data quality, validation, and failure modes.
- Excellent communication skills.
- Resilience and problem-solving attitude.
- Strong organisational and planning skills.
- Ability to effectively prioritise work.
- Attention to detail.
Desirable Requirements
Qualifications
- Masters degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related field.
Experience
- Experience with Snowflake or other cloud data warehouses.
- Experience with version control.
- Experience working with containerisation or orchestration tools (e.g. Docker, Airflow).
- Experience visualising data using Tableau.
- Experience creating data visulisations and exploratory analyses using Python (e.g. matplotlib, seaborn, plotly).
- Experience simplifying legacy or patchwork architectures.
- Data science, machine learning, or advanced modelling.
Knowledge, Skills and Qualities
- Evidence of previous work, such as: GitHub repositories, technical blogs, published analyses or reports, contributions to open-source projects.
About The Club
As a founder member of the Football League (EFL), Bolton Wanderers is a football club that is internationally renowned, having played in all four professional leagues of English football, as well as winning the FA Cup on four occasions.
Since the 2019 acquisition by Football Ventures (Whites) Ltd, a new chapter is underway for Bolton Wanderers and Bolton Stadium Hotel, focused on actively shaping a dynamic and enduring future. We are committed to a distinctive approach, driving the club's progress with ambitious plans realised through practical, genuine and comprehensive strategies.
As we continue striving towards achieving greater success, we now have a fantastic opportunity for a Data Platform Engineer to join our forward thinking and innovative First Team Data Department.
As as equal opportunities employer, Bolton Wanderers Football Club is committed to the equal treatment of all current and prospective employees and does not condone discrimination on the basis of age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, or marriage and civil partnership.
We aspire to have a diverse and inclusive workplace and strongly encourage suitably qualified applicants from a wide range of backgrounds to apply and join us.
BWFC seek to ensure that all children and young people are protected and kept safe from harm while they are with staff and volunteers within Bolton Wanderers activities. Everyone at Bolton Wanderers has a safeguarding responsibility to all work colleagues, fans and any vulnerable adults and children.
About Bolton Wanderers Football Club