Senior Data Engineering Manager (3977)

About GBG

Enabling safe and rewarding digital lives for genuine people, everywhere

We make it our mission to ensure more genuine people have digital access to opportunities, and businesses have access to more genuine people. Our technology draws on diverse and reliable data to create a single point of truth for identity and address verification.

With over 30 years of experience behind us our team and technology are focused on enabling safe and rewarding digital lives for everyone. Regardless of age, location or background, genuine people everywhere should be able to digitally prove who they are and where they live.

About the team and role

We are looking for a Senior Data Engineering Manager who is deeply hands-on with technology and able to lead from the front. This role will lead teams delivering strategic AI initiatives that enhance and differentiate our Location products, combining large-scale data engineering with applied machine learning and NLP.

You will remain close to design and implementation, acting as a technical authority and coach, while also owning delivery, team health, and alignment to product strategy. This is not a purely managerial role — success requires strong technical judgement, architectural leadership, and the ability to guide teams through complex AI-driven systems in production.

What you will do

Senior Leadership & Organisation Design

• Act as hands-on technical leader for data and AI-driven Location platforms & services
• Set architectural direction for data pipelines, feature stores, and AI inference workflows
• Lead design reviews, make high-impact technical decisions, and unblock complex engineering challenges
• Stay close to code, tooling, and cloud architecture to maintain technical credibility
• Establish best practices for production-grade AI systems (performance, monitoring, reliability)

AI & Location Strategy

• Lead delivery of strategic initiatives applying AI and NLP to Location data and products
• Partner with Product and Domain experts to translate Location use cases into scalable AI solutions
• Guide teams on feature engineering, model integration, and inference at scale
• Balance experimentation velocity with production robustness and long-term maintainability

Platform & Delivery Ownership

• Own end-to-end delivery of data and AI pipelines on AWS
• Ensure systems meet expectations for latency, scalability, cost efficiency, and data quality
• Drive pragmatic technical trade-offs aligned to business priorities
• Define and track metrics for data freshness, model performance, and platform reliability

People Leadership & Team Growth

• Lead, mentor, and develop senior data engineers and applied ML engineers
• Build a culture of strong engineering fundamentals, curiosity, and accountability
• Support hiring and development of high-calibre engineers in Kuala Lumpur
• Create an environment where engineers can do their best technical work and grow

Stakeholder Collaboration

• Work closely with Product, Engineering, and AI stakeholders to shape roadmaps and priorities
• Clearly communicate complex technical topics to non-technical audiences
• Represent data engineering and applied AI in senior forums

Skills we're looking for

Technical

• Strong background in data engineering with applied AI/ML systems in production
• Extensive experience building cloud-native platforms on AWS
• Advanced proficiency in Python, including production data and AI pipelines
• Hands-on experience with NLP frameworks such as spaCy (or similar)
• Strong understanding of data modelling, feature engineering, and scalable inference
• Experience designing low-latency and high-throughput data systems

Leadership

• Proven experience leading engineers while remaining technically hands-on
• Ability to coach teams through complex architectural and implementation decisions
• Strong delivery ownership and bias toward execution
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills

Nice to Have

• Experience with geospatial or Location-based data
• Exposure to feature stores, vector search, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems
• Experience deploying AI models in regulated or high-availability environments
• Familiarity with MLOps practices (model versioning, monitoring, CI/CD)

To find out more

As an equal opportunity employer, we are dedicated to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone feels valued and empowered. Please inform your GBG Talent Attraction Partner if you require any reasonable adjustments to the interview process.

To chat to the Talent Attraction team and find out more about our benefits and why we’re a great place to work, drop an email to [email protected] and we’ll be in touch. You can also find out more about careers at GBG and check out our current opportunities at gbgplc.com/careers.

Unleash your potential and be part of our mission to power safe and rewarding digital lives.