It’s time to go places

Changes to our Application Process.

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

– – –

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

Cloud
Collaboration
Communication
Creativity/Innovation
Curiosity
Interpersonal Skills
Leadership
Business unit:
Division:
Employment Type:

Changes to our Application Process.

We are in the process of making a number of changes to our application process and overall candidate experience. This will occur in a number of phases and you may be required to create a new candidate profile or input some additional info for your application to be progressed. If you have already successfully applied for a role, we kindly ask that you do not re-apply for this. Our teams will be in touch by phone or email if we wish to progress your application to the next stage.

Thank you for your understanding and patience at this time and we wish you the best of luck with your application.