Senior Manager, Data Engineering Service & SRE

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About the role

BT’s vision for Data & AI is to become the market leader in AI‑powered connectivity, solutions, and services. Realizing this vision requires world class engineering with modern data platforms on uplifted engineering practices with accelerated shift to cloud-native, automated, high quality data delivery.
This role is central to ensuring Data Engineering delivers reliable, consistent outcomes when operating in an embedded model. As some engineering capability is distributed closer to the business, this role ensures clear ownership, strong engineering discipline, and resilient production support, while avoiding duplication and inefficiency. 

This role sits within Data Engineering, operating across embedded engineering teams eg those aligned to Consumer, Openreach and other frontline domains. 

As data engineering capability is embedded closer to the business, this role ensures clear ownership, strong engineering discipline and reliable live services, especially where accountability can be blurred. You will provide leadership for delivery, production support and remediation, ensuring consistent outcomes regardless of embedding model.

The role directly strengthens BT’s Data & AI strategy by strengthening engineering quality, production resilience and scalable best practices across the organisation.

What you’ll be doing

• Take end‑to‑end engineering accountability for embedded data engineering teams, ensuring consistent delivery and service outcomes.
• Own Level 3 production support, including code changes to resolve incidents, recurring defects and live data issues.
• Lead security vulnerability remediation, ensuring fixes are delivered, validated and not deferred.
• Deliver platform and service upgrades in partnership with central platform teams, with safe rollout and post‑release support.
• Improve data quality and anomaly detection, ensuring issues are identified early, resolved and learned from.
• Drive reduction of technical, data and operational debt, prioritising systemic fixes where issues repeat.
• Standardise and share best practices across embedded teams to reduce duplication and improve efficiency.
• Improve test maturity, including automated testing, regression coverage and quality gates.
• Ensure disciplined use of engineering and quality tooling (e.g. Jira, SonarQube or equivalents).
• Operate embedded engineering as a clear, accountable service, with defined ownership across run, fix, upgrade and improvement.
• Build strong, trusted senior stakeholder relationships, acting as the accountable engineering owner.
• Balance live service stability with delivery demand, security, upgrades and continuous improvement.

Essential Skills / Experience

• Experience leading and transforming software/data engineering in complex technology landscapes — with a demonstrated ability to cut through ambiguity, align multiple teams and stakeholders, and drive tangible delivery and service outcomes at scale.
• Strong experience taking accountability for platforms with federated engineering/delivery
• Proven senior leadership experience owning delivery, live services and remediation across embedded or federated engineering models.
• Deep understanding of cloud technologies, including operating, upgrading and supporting cloud‑based platforms in live production environments.
• Strong understanding of data engineering patterns, including data ingestion, transformation, quality management, resilience and operational support.
• Experience balancing change delivery, run stability, security remediation, upgrades and technical debt reduction in high‑pressure environments.
• Demonstrated capability in improving software/data engineering quality and test maturity, including use of automated testing, quality gates and defect reduction practices.
• Strong working knowledge of engineering delivery and quality tooling (e.g. Jira for stories, incidents and defects; SonarQube or equivalent for code quality and technical debt tracking) and data engineering technologies (BigQuery, Dataflow, Airflow, Cloud storage)
• Ability to absorb, standardise and scale best practices across multiple teams and domains without introducing excess bureaucracy.
• Excellent stakeholder management skills — able to build strong, trusted relationships, reset expectations when required, and hold delivery teams accountable.
• Experience working with engineering delivery, defect and quality tooling (e.g. Jira, SonarQube or equivalents).
• Background in data, platform, software engineering, architecture, build/test with high availability and security needs.
• Understanding of BT Consumer and / or Openreach environments is a strong plus, particularly experience working with front‑line, customer‑impacting platforms and services.
• Commercially astute, with experience delivering tcomes using constrained, mixed or optimised resourcing models.
• Story-telling with data: Strong skills in building the case for change, drawing on data and analytical techniques where appropriate, and communicating this to business audiences 

BT Group is the UK’s leading communications group and the holding company behind some of the country’s most recognised brands – including BT, EE, Openreach and Plusnet. Our purpose is as simple as it is ambitious: we connect for good.  Our customers include consumers, small, medium and large businesses, public sector organisations and other communications providers. 

BT Group’s role is about setting direction, unlocking value and creating the conditions for our brands and businesses to thrive.

Having come through the most capital-intensive phase of our fibre investment, our focus now is on what comes next – simplifying how we operate, using technology and AI to work smarter, and organising ourselves to serve customers better and grow sustainably. Group teams shape strategy, policy, brand, capital allocation and transformation, helping the whole organisation perform at its best.

We have a singular culture that unites all our people: we are customer-first challengers, who are committed, clear and connected. These behaviours unite us as one team to deliver for our colleagues, our customers, our stakeholders and the country.   Joining BT Group means working at the heart of a business that matters to the UK, with the opportunity to shape decisions, influence outcomes and help set the future course of one of the country’s most important companies.