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, hey, that's what got us here.)
About the role
Hybrid
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 the reliable, scalable, and (very importantly) 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: You’ll hire, coach and grow a team of talented data engineers, helping them do their best work (and enjoy doing it).
- Creating a safe, curious environment: You’ll foster a culture where experimentation is encouraged, failure is a lesson, and learning never stops.
- Owning delivery and quality: You’ll keep things moving — prioritising work, unblocking challenges, and ensuring high standards across everything shipped.
- Driving engineering excellence: You’ll champion best practices across testing, observability, CI/CD, and performance optimisation (because smooth pipelines = happy teams).
- Building AI-ready foundations: You’ll help shape data platforms that support ML and AI use cases — from reproducibility to responsible data practices.
- Shaping strategy and standards: You’ll influence how data engineering is done at Skyscanner, evolving standards, tooling and ways of working.
- Collaborating across teams: You’ll partner with product, analytics and data science to turn fuzzy problems into clear, impactful solutions.
About you
- Experienced leader: You’ve led and grown data engineering teams in product-led environments and know how to bring out the best in people.
- Technically strong: You’re comfortable with modern data stacks like Databricks, Spark, Airflow, SQL and Python — and you can go deep when needed.
- Cloud-savvy: You understand distributed systems and cloud platforms, and how to make them work efficiently at scale.
- Quality-driven: You care about doing things well — from clean code to reliable pipelines and solid operational practices.
- Collaborative by nature: You work brilliantly across disciplines and know how to align teams around shared goals.
- Comfortable with ambiguity: You don’t need everything perfectly defined to get started — you bring clarity where there isn’t any.
- Future-focused: You’re excited about AI, data innovation, and how better foundations unlock faster, smarter product development
What it's like here
We are the real deal — no corporate gloss, no empty promises. Just a team of genuinely curious, caring humans, building things that help travellers explore the world a little easier.
Skyscanner is made up of brilliant humans from every corner of the world. We believe travel makes the world better - and that the same is true of our diverse teams. We're proud to be an equal opportunities employer and are committed to building an inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive and products that are accessible to all.
Sound like your kind of adventure? Apply now and help us shape the future of travel.
We're committed to ensuring our application and recruitment processes are inclusive and accessible to everyone. If you require any reasonable adjustments or accommodations for interviews, and/or wish to apply under the Disability Confident scheme, please let your recruiter know. If you’d like more information on any of our policies, such as hybrid working or Parental Leave policies (typically we pay a minimum of 24 weeks birth parent/maternity leave globally), our recruitment team can provide more information on these.
Skills Required
- Proven experience hiring, coaching and growing data engineering teams
- Proficiency with Databricks
- Proficiency with Apache Spark
- Experience building and operating workflows with Airflow
- Strong SQL skills
- Proficient in Python
- Experience with cloud platforms and distributed systems at scale
- Familiarity with CI/CD, testing, observability and performance optimisation for data pipelines
- Experience designing data platforms to support ML/AI use cases, reproducibility and responsible data practices
- Strong cross-functional collaboration with product, analytics and data science
Skyscanner Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Skyscanner and has not been reviewed or approved by Skyscanner.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Policies highlight generous paid time off, extended leave options, and the ability to work from other countries or offices for a defined period each year. Feedback suggests this flexibility is a distinctive strength for a travel-focused employer.
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Parental & Family Support — Public materials indicate a robust baseline for birth-parent leave globally and invite candidates to confirm details by location. This signals an above-average commitment to family support within the benefits package.
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Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits — Offerings include wellbeing allowances, mental-health app access, gym discounts, and travel reimbursements/discounts alongside day-to-day perks. Feedback suggests these lifestyle benefits meaningfully complement core compensation.
Skyscanner Insights
What We Do
🌎 We're here to help every traveller explore the world effortlessly, for generations to come.
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