Senior Data Engineer - Global People Data

WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands. We unite cutting-edge media intelligence and data solutions, world-class creativity, next-generation production, transformative enterprise solutions and expert strategic counsel in a single company – powered by exceptional talent and our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open, to help our clients navigate change, capture opportunity and deliver transformational growth. We work with the world's most valuable brands and have global reach across 100+ markets, with deep local expertise.

Our people are the key to our success. We're committed to fostering a culture of creativity, belonging and continuous learning, attracting and developing the brightest talent, and providing exciting career opportunities that help our people grow. com.

Why we're hiring: WPP is at the forefront of the marketing and advertising industry's largest transformation. Our Global CIO is leading a significant evolution of our Enterprise Technology capabilities, bringing together over 2,500 technology professionals into an integrated global team. This team will play a crucial role in enabling the ongoing transformation of our agencies and functions.

We are seeking a Senior Data Engineer to serve as the technical anchor for WPP's global people data product. This is a hands-on senior role within the People Data Insights team, responsible for the design, implementation, and ongoing evolution of the data pipelines and models that underpin enterprise-wide workforce reporting, regulatory compliance, and strategic people analytics across 90+ markets and 100K+ employees. This is not a coordination role.

It requires deep, practised data engineering capability combined with the architectural judgement to make enterprise-grade design decisions independently — with full autonomy over schema, ingestion patterns, data standardisation, and pipeline architecture — in a complex, multi-source, globally scaled environment. What you'll be doing: Pipeline Design Delivery: Lead the design and implementation of core data pipelines that ingest, transform, and model people data from multiple HR and workforce systems — including Workday — into a governed, enterprise-grade data model built on Databricks and Delta Lake. Data Modelling Standards: Own and evolve canonical people data structures across the global people data platform.

Define and enforce schemas, ingestion patterns, and transformation logic that support scalability, consistency, and downstream reporting, analytics, and regulatory use cases. Technical Decision Authority: Make day-to-day architectural and design decisions independently — on schema design, data standardisation approaches, and pipeline patterns — reducing escalation to senior leadership and enabling faster, higher-confidence delivery.

Requirements

, including the EU

Pay Transparency

Directive, UK Gender Pay Gap reporting, and ESG/CSRD workforce data obligations. Platform Alignment: Partner closely with enterprise data and business platforms teams to ensure the people data architecture aligns with WPP's broader data platform standards, governance frameworks, and integration patterns. Technical Leadership: Provide senior technical guidance, code review, and architectural oversight to other data engineers within the team — raising standards, improving consistency, and building engineering capability across the function.

Governance Quality: Embed data quality checks, validation frameworks, and governance controls into pipeline and model design — ensuring the platform remains accurate, audit-ready, and defensible for executive and regulatory reporting.