Director of Data Engineering & Platform (Hybrid, Porto, PT)
Hands-on director role at Planet leading the hospitality data engineering team (3-5 engineers) to migrate customers from on-prem PMS to a cloud PMS on AWS — owning database architecture, performance tuning, migration tooling, and reporting data enablement. Hybrid: three days a week in the Porto office.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Portugal
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 10+ years
- Category
- Data engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 10+ years of experience across data engineering, cloud platforms, software engineering, or related disciplines, including technical leadership
- Proven experience leading and developing engineering teams, ideally in a distributed and multicultural environment
- Broad, hands-on AWS experience and understanding of cloud architecture, security, networking, observability, reliability, automation, and cost management
- Deep expertise in relational database architecture including MySQL and PostgreSQL (schema design, query optimization, indexing, capacity planning, performance tuning)
- Experience designing and executing complex, high-volume data migrations with validation, reconciliation, automation, and operational controls
- Experience operating production data platforms with monitoring, incident prevention, recovery, and service-health practices
- 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, or external partners
- Practical experience applying AI to a real data engineering, migration, reporting, or operational use case with measurable outcome
- Strong communication and stakeholder-management skills
Nice to have
- Experience with Amazon Aurora MySQL and Amazon RDS in highly available, 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
- Knowledge of data governance, privacy, security, compliance, and controlled third-party data access
- Experience in hospitality, SaaS, fintech, retail, or another transaction-intensive domain
- Familiarity with Property Management Systems or migrating legacy, customer-specific operational data
Full description
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.