Director of Data Engineering & Platform

About Planet

Planet is a global provider of integrated technology and payments solutions for retail and hospitality customers.

We create great experiences for the millions of people who use our payments, software, and tax-free solutions every minute of every day.

Planet empowers its customers to deliver great customer experiences by combining payments and software in ways that drive greater loyalty, increase revenue and save time.

Founded over 35 years ago and with our headquarters in London, today we have more than 2,500 employees located across six continents serving our customers in more than 120 markets.

Role Overview

We are seeking a hands-on, strategically minded, and execution-focused Director of Data Platform & Migration Engineering to lead our Hospitality data engineering function and support one of the company's most important strategic initiatives: the bulk migration of customers from On-Prem Property Management Systems (PMS) to our Cloud PMS platform.

This role will own the strategy and execution across data migrations, database architecture and health, performance engineering, and reporting data enablement. You will lead a team of 3-5 data engineers responsible for building scalable migration capabilities, strengthening our data platforms, and creating reliable foundations for reporting and downstream data solutions.

The successful candidate will bring broad, practical AWS experience beyond managed database services. They should be comfortable operating within a cloud-native ecosystem and partnering on architecture, security, networking, observability, reliability, automation, and cost-aware design. They will work closely with application engineering, Product, QA, DevOps, Architecture, and Operations because many database and migration improvements require coordinated changes across the wider platform.

This is an equal part strategic and hands-on leadership role for someone who enjoys solving complex data problems, improving operational efficiency, and applying AI where it produces measurable value in migrations, reporting, or data engineering.

What you will do

Own the strategy and roadmap for Hospitality data platforms, ensuring scalable, secure, resilient, maintainable, and cost-effective solutions within the broader AWS environment.

• Lead the strategy and execution for bulk migrations from On-Prem PMS solutions to Cloud PMS, including planning, tooling, automation, orchestration, transformation, validation, reconciliation, rollback, and operational readiness.
• Own the data engineering strategy for reporting and define governed, scalable ways to provide reliable data to solution partners for reports, analytics, and other data solutions.
• Own the architecture, health, performance, scalability, resilience, and lifecycle of databases supporting Hospitality products, primarily Cloud PMS.
• Set database engineering standards for data modelling, schema design, indexing, query patterns, change management, capacity planning, backup and recovery, and production readiness.
• Lead performance tuning and platform enhancements across Amazon Aurora MySQL on Amazon RDS, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and related technologies.
• Partner with application engineering teams to deliver application-level changes that improve database efficiency, data quality, reliability, and scalability.
• Establish AWS platform guardrails, observability, operational metrics, automation, disaster-recovery practices, and service ownership for data-intensive systems.
• Apply AI in practical, responsible ways to reduce manual effort and improve quality across migrations, reporting, and data engineering, including mapping, transformation, anomaly detection, reconciliation, risk identification, and documentation.
• Ensure AI initiatives move beyond experimentation by defining measurable outcomes, validation, security controls, human oversight, and clear operational ownership.
• Lead, coach, and grow data engineering team, building a culture of ownership, technical excellence, learning, pragmatic decision-making, and continuous improvement.
• Translate ambiguous business needs into a prioritized roadmap and executable plans, collaborating closely with Product, Engineering, Architecture, QA, DevOps, Security, Operations, and partner-facing teams across distributed locations.

Who you are

10+ years of experience across data engineering, cloud platforms, software engineering, or related disciplines, including meaningful technical leadership responsibility.

• Proven experience leading and developing engineering teams, ideally in a distributed and multicultural environment.
• Broad, hands-on AWS experience and sound understanding of cloud architecture, security, networking, observability, reliability, automation, and cost management.
• Deep expertise in relational database architecture and engineering, including MySQL and PostgreSQL, with practical knowledge of schema design, query optimization, indexing, capacity planning, and performance tuning.
• Experience designing and executing complex, high-volume data migrations with robust validation, reconciliation, automation, and operational controls.
• Experience operating production data platforms and establishing monitoring, incident prevention, recovery, and service-health practices.
• Demonstrated ability to partner with application engineering teams and influence application design to improve data quality, performance, and scalability.
• Experience defining data-delivery approaches for reporting, analytics, integrations, customers, or external solution partners.
• Practical experience applying AI to a real data engineering, data migration, reporting, or operational use case, with the ability to explain the problem, approach, controls, and measurable outcome.
• Strong communication and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to translate technical complexity into business outcomes, decisions, and executable plans.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Amazon Aurora MySQL and Amazon RDS in highly available and performance-sensitive production environments.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and mixed relational and NoSQL estates.
• Hands-on knowledge of ProxySQL or similar database proxy, connection-pooling, and traffic-management technologies.
• Experience building cloud-native data platforms, migration factories, reporting ecosystems, or partner-facing data products on AWS.
• Experience using infrastructure as code, CI/CD, automation, and modern observability practices in AWS environments.
• Knowledge of data governance, privacy, security, compliance, and controlled third-party data access.
• Experience in hospitality, SaaS, fintech, retail, or another transaction-intensive and operationally critical domain.
• Familiarity with Property Management Systems or the challenges of migrating legacy, customer-specific operational data is a strong plus.

Why Planet:

Planet is an equal opportunity employer where diversity is valued, and all employment is decided based on qualifications, merit, and business need.

Come and grow your career in the most exciting, fast paced technology market, with a business that delivers feel-good connected commerce.

We would love to hear from you - Apply now.

At Planet, we embrace a hybrid work model, with three days a week in the office.

Reasonable accommodations may be made in order to allow for an individual to perform the essential functions of this role successfully.