Test Engineering Manager - Distributed Systems - skyscanner

DATA ENGINEERING MANAGER

Location: London or Edinburgh (Hybrid)

ABOUT SKYSCANNER

Everyone loves travelling, but planning is not without its challenges. That's why we've spent 20 years building tools that turn travel-planning chaos into a breeze. Today, around 100 million travellers count on us every month to skip the whole “47 browser tabs open” phase and find flights, cars, and hotels quickly and easily.

Joining Skyscanner means becoming part of a global brand that's striving to become the planet's go-to travel hack accessible for all.

Our vision? To be the world's number one travel ally. Ambitious? Yes, but that's what got us here.

ABOUT THE ROLE

This isn’t just another engineering management role — it’s your chance to shape the data backbone of an AI-first travel company. You’ll lead a high-performing squad within Core Data, building reliable, scalable, and trusted data products that power everything from experiments to real-time traveller experiences.

Think of it as part leadership, part technical strategy, part “let’s make data actually useful at scale.” You’ll help set the pace, raise the bar, and make sure our data platforms are ready not just for today, but for where AI is taking us next.

WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING

• Leading a high-impact squad: Hire, coach, and grow a team of talented data engineers in London, helping them do their best work and enjoy doing it.
• Creating a safe, curious environment: Foster a culture where experimentation is encouraged, failure is a lesson, and learning never stops.
• Owning delivery and quality: Prioritise work, unblock challenges, and ensure high standards across everything shipped.
• Driving engineering excellence: Champion best practices for testing, observability, CI/CD, and performance optimisation.
• Building AI-ready foundations: Shape data platforms that support ML and AI use cases — from reproducibility to responsible data practices.
• Shaping strategy and standards: Influence how data engineering is done at Skyscanner, evolving standards, tooling, and ways of working.
• Collaborating across teams: Partner with product, analytics, and data science to turn fuzzy problems into clear, impactful solutions.

ABOUT YOU

• Experienced leader: Led and grown data engineering teams in product-led environments; able to bring out the best in people.
• Technically strong: Comfortable with modern data stacks like Databricks, Spark, Airflow, SQL, and Python — able to go deep when needed.
• Cloud-savvy: Understands distributed systems and cloud platforms, and how to make them work efficiently at scale.
• Quality-driven: Cares about doing things well — from clean code to reliable pipelines to solid operational practices.