Data Engineer @ Middlesborough FC
At Data Decoded in Manchester I talked to lots of people about the current role of data engineering in football and beyond, and specifically how more clubs are beginning to understand how important it is. Many of the talks I listened to there were on perhaps more forward-focussed subjects like context engineering and agentic AI, but the stage that was continually packed was the one I spoke on, the engineering stage. There was another really cool talk by Shachar Meir who touched on this, and pointed out that if you’re going to stay relevant as a data team you need, amongst other things, to be willing to work hard to produce data reliably and robustly. As he put it "It's much easier to build 600 dashboards than it is to build 6."
With that, here is an opportunity to join a newly established department at Middlesbrough Football Club. Being newly established doesn’t mean this is the first time Middlesbrough are using data, but it is somewhat surprising that this has only become a separate department recently, if I’ve read this right. To be fair, I haven’t been able to speak to anybody at Middlesbrough directly, so I don’t know too much about the specifics of their historical setup.
But looking at the advert, we can tell this feels like a standard data engineering role, albeit one that appears to be either in the middle of a migration or thinking seriously about investing in one. It says you’ll be working across football and the business, and you’ll support the development of a modern Lakehouse architecture using Microsoft Fabric.
Based on the language used in the advert (semantic models, star schemas etc.), it seems likely there’s a set of legacy reports, probably in Power BI, and they’re looking to upgrade the whole system onto Fabric. It says they want you to migrate the reports, not necessarily rationalise them. Again, I haven’t spoken to anyone there, but I imagine the essential job will be to make sense of the data, migrate the data solutions and reporting and then probably do some rationalisation.
The skills they’re asking for are pretty generic. It doesn’t specifically say you need experience with football data but being highly competent in Microsoft Fabric is probably going to be key here. They’re also looking for Python, experience building ETL pipelines, dimensional modelling and version control.
So all in all a fairly traditional data engineering role, but one that’s could have significant challenges with a legacy system and/or organic processes to unpick. It could be a good setup and a great opportunity for someone to grow, potentially moving into building models, at a club that has been doing pretty well recently.
No salary or location listed that I can see, closing date 23rd of October.
