Data Engineering Manager

What are you looking for?

What do we offer?

• To be courageous
• To live wholeheartedly
• To keep growing

What do you bring?

• Passion for your expertise
• True tech-savvy
• High focus on quality

How you can
make a difference

Working at Albert Heijn is not just a job; it's meaningful work. You work in an informal atmosphere alongside a passionate team that strives to stay ahead and make a difference. With your unique talents, you have an impact on the lives of our customers. You learn from experts in their fields, and we assist you in shaping your career. You can work flexibly with us, either from home or at our headquarters in Zaandam. A job at Albert Heijn is not just a job for now but also for the future.

What does this mean for you?

Team at Retail Business Platform is looking for an experienced Engineering Manager to help define the way of working with data and dataflow in modern cutting-edge technology landscape (Azure, Microservices, Databricks). A leadership role in a complex domain that is responsible for the applications relying on dataflow in the Albert Heijn in Netherlands.

This is how you will reinvent food retail.

As the Data Engineering Manager, you will lead a team of data engineers focused on building, maintaining, and optimizing data solutions on a custom-built data platform, leveraging Azure and Databricks. This role focuses on improving data quality, platform reliability, and ensuring the team matures alongside a well-defined data strategy. You will drive the design and delivery of data pipelines and scalable data marts, and implement DevOps practices to deliver highly reliable and performant data solutions that align with the company’s business objectives.

Key Responsibilities:

Leadership & Team Development:

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of data engineers, fostering a culture of innovation, accountability, and technical excellence.
• Drive team growth by providing continuous feedback, career development opportunities, and ensuring alignment with business goals.
• Enable collaboration across product, analytics, and business teams to ensure effective delivery of data solutions.

Technical Leadership & Execution:

• Oversee the design, implementation, and optimization of data pipelines and data marts on the company’s custom data platform.
• Improve data quality and consistency by implementing monitoring frameworks, automated validation processes, and issue resolution workflows.
• Enhance platform reliability and resilience, focusing on scalability, performance, and fault tolerance.
• Leverage Azure services to ensure efficient data ingestion, transformation, and storage processes.
• Integrate DevOps best practices, including CI/CD pipelines, version control, and infrastructure automation, for efficient and repeatable deployments.

Platform Optimization & Innovation:

• Drive improvements to the custom-built data platform architecture to support growing business requirements and emerging technologies.
• Implement strategies to optimize platform performance, minimize downtime, and enhance resilience in data workflows.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to define and shape the data strategy as the team and platform mature.

Project Delivery & Management:

• Plan and prioritize team projects, ensuring on-time delivery, high quality, and alignment with business needs.
• Partner with stakeholders to gather requirements, define project scope, and set success metrics.
• Proactively identify risks, implement mitigation strategies, and ensure the delivery of reliable and scalable solutions.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

1. Improving Data Quality:
   • Reduce data errors and inconsistencies by implementing automated data validation processes across ETL workflows.
   • Achieve a measurable improvement (e.g., 90%+ reduction) in the number of data quality issues flowing from source systems to the data platform.
2. Enhancing Reliability and Resilience:
   • Increase platform uptime and reliability, targeting 99.9% availability for critical data workflows.
   • Reduce pipeline failures and recovery time by implementing fault-tolerant workflows and monitoring systems.
3. Shaping the Data Strategy:
   • Define and implement a scalable data strategy aligned with business goals to support advanced analytics and reporting needs.
   • Measure the team’s maturity through the adoption of best practices, automation improvements, and delivery cadence.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field.
• 6+ years of experience in data engineering or software engineering, with at least 3+ years in a leadership or managerial role.
• Proven experience designing, developing, and optimizing ETL pipelines and data marts for analytics and reporting.
• Hands-on experience with Databricks and Azure services, such as Azure Data Factory, and Azure Data Lake.
• Expertise in improving data quality, monitoring data flows, and implementing error-handling mechanisms.
• Experience implementing DevOps practices for data engineering, including CI/CD pipelines, version control (Git), and infrastructure automation.
• Proficiency in SQL and Python for data processing and workflow automation.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with streaming and real-time data processing tools (e.g., Apache Kafka, or Azure Event Hubs).
• Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform for managing cloud-based data platforms.
• Previous experience driving data strategy in a growing, data-centric organization.
• Exposure to Agile project management methodologies.
• Strong leadership and team development capabilities, with a focus on coaching and driving performance.

• Ability to define and implement processes to improve data quality, reliability, and resilience.
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills, with a results-driven mindset.
• Effective communication and stakeholder management, with the ability to articulate technical solutions to non-technical audiences.
• Strategic thinking and the ability to shape long-term data strategy while delivering short-term wins.

Your new team and office.

Together with your teams you will work on inspiring projects to accelerate our transition into a hybrid Food & Tech company. We want to leverage data and technology to future-proof food shopping and give our customers the accessibility to healthy food more easily available for everyone. At Albert Heijn, you team up with inspiring peers in the data, digital and tech domains. A community of diverse individuals who share a common goal to create digital solutions that make our processes simpler, more robust and adaptable. We invest heavily in data, digital and tech and that includes investing in your career! Our teams work in a hybrid way: both from home as well as in the office. We are located right next to the train station of Zaandam

We think it’s important to be part of a high-belonging team; a team where you can be yourself and feel safe, accepted and appreciated. For this job we are preferably looking for someone who brings diversity in our team, in the widest possible sense. Someone who is a great addition to our team by bringing other ideas to the table. Don’t check all the boxes? Don’t worry, we probably don’t either 😉. Don’t hesitate to apply if you think you are up for the challenge, we’re happy to have a look at your resume!

What we offer.
At Albert Heijn we aim to grow, and this is only possible if you grow along with us. As we work together to build our brand and your career, you can count on (based on 40 hours per week): 

• An annual salary up to 110K including holiday allowance and a flexible bonus. Depending on your level of seniority and experience;  
• A minimum of 20 days paid vacation, optionally 12.5 days extra. Do you want to take that extra time off, or would you rather convert the extra days into discounts or sell them for cash? You’re the end boss!; 
• Flexible working hours; 
• Access to a challenging training curriculum – AH Tech Academy; 
• An excellent pension plan where we as an employer contribute 4,5 more than you as an employee;  
• A travel allowance or a NS-business card for traveling to and from Zaandam by train; 
• Attractive discounts on various insurance policies; 
• 10% staff discount on groceries in all Albert Heijn stores, to a maximum of €300 per year; 
• A free Mijn Albert Heijn Premium membership with many benefits;
• A company laptop and telephone.

We’re Albert Heijn, food retail reinventors. 🚀
Albert Heijn goes way back. More than 135 years, to be exact. So for millions of people, food shopping is synonymous with the Albert Heijn brand. We didn’t achieve this with a complacent, ‘hey, if it works today, it’ll work tomorrow’ approach, but by continually rethinking our propositions and staying plugged in to customer demands. More than 125,000 colleagues? Check. Over 1,250 stores in the Netherlands and Flanders? Check. The leading online food retail platform? Check, we build, run and love it.

Together we make eating better the easy choice. For everyone.

The world around us has changed, and significantly at that. These changes have impact on the lives of our customers, colleagues and partners. And therefore, also on Albert Heijn. We’re moving towards a new world with new opportunities and challenges. Albert Heijn wants more people to eat fresher, healthier and more sustainable food. Eating brings us together, keeps us healthier and contributes positively to the world. Our mission is: Together we make eating better the easy choice. For everyone.

Albert Heijn the Netherlands is B Corp certified. This underscores our purpose, through which we aim to contribute to a healthier, more social, and sustainable society. B Corp certification is a designation that a business is meeting high standards of verified performance, accountability and transparency.

Ready to contribute to our mission?

What
matters to us?

Ahold Delhaize is one of the world’s largest food retail groups and a leader in both supermarkets and e-commerce. Together, we help people eat well, save time and live better – it’s how we make a difference. And we do it because we care: for our customers, our people and the world around us.

Be courageous

"I realized how much impact you can truly have as an individual, working for such a huge international company.”
Robert Němec, Solution Architecture Manager

Live wholeheartedly

“The support this company has always offered means the world to me."
Christy Elgee, Manager of Cyber Defense and Operations, Ahold Delhaize USA

Keep growing

“I feel the freedom to show initiative, propose changes and try new things. Having that freedom gave me wings to fly.”
Robert Němec, Solution Architecture Manager