Data Engineer, Data

"You care about making a positive impact in the world. You understand greatness requires thinking differently. An inclusive and accepting work environment is important to you.

A job at IKEA is so much more than home furnishings. Together, we work to make a better everyday life for the many. It's the perfect fit if you want to contribute, grow, and share. Join the team and start a better life for yourself."

Location

San Sebastián de los Reyes

Employment type

Full Time Permanent

Department

IT & Digital Solutions

Deadline

Who you are

Hej Our mission—to create a better everyday life for the many people—is constant. But how we reach them is not.

To serve and reach more of the many, we must decode the complex DNA of each market and turn it into reliable, real-time intelligence for product teams. That's a data engineering challenge at scale. We're looking for a product-obsessed Senior Data Engineer to build the trusted data platforms and pipelines that power the intelligence engine guiding IKEA's multi-billion euro expansion.

We believe the best engineers are systems thinkers and product builders at heart. We would be excited to talk to you if this describes you:

• Your Technical Foundation — You have 5+ years of hands-on building production data systems. You design and operate batch and streaming pipelines on cloud platforms (GCP preferred) using tools like BigQuery, Dataflow/Beam, Pub/Sub (or Kafka), Cloud Composer/Airflow, and dbt. You're fluent in SQL and write production-grade Python/Scala for data processing and orchestration. You understand data modeling (star/snowflake, vault), partitioning, clustering, and performance at TB–PB scale.
• How You Solve Problems — You turn ambiguous data needs into robust, observable data products with clear SLAs. You balance speed and rigor, apply 80/20 thinking to prioritize the highest-value work, and design for evolution (schema versioning, data contracts, contract testing). You're comfortable with messy external data (mobility, demographics, POIs) and geospatial datasets, and you bring strong judgment on trade-offs between batch vs. streaming, precompute vs. on-demand, and storage formats.
• How You Drive Product Success — You build for users, not just for pipelines. You co-define metrics and semantics with analysts and PMs, instrument event streams, and ship data features that enable scenario simulators, interactive maps, and network planning tools. You partner with Data Scientists to productionize features, models, and feature stores with reproducible pipelines, CI/CD, and monitoring.
• How You Scale Your Impact — You operate with a founder mindset: automate everything that repeats, codify standards, and raise the bar for reliability and quality (testing, lineage, observability). You champion governance and privacy by design (GDPR, PII handling, access controls), mentor engineers, and cultivate strong cross-functional collaboration across Product, Engineering, and Data Science.

This is our wish list If you don't recognize yourself in every one of these points, you might still be an excellent candidate for the role. We are looking for exceptional individuals and like to think long-term about investing in people's development together with us.

The IKEA culture and values are very much a part of our business and day-to-day work life. For you to thrive and grow with IKEA, it's important for us that you share our values You can read more regarding our values and life at IKEA on our website

What you'll be doing day to day

As the lead data engineer embedded in a digital product squad, your mission is to deliver trustworthy, timely, and well-modeled data that powers expansion strategy products used by markets worldwide.

This means you will:

• Build Expansion360, the expansion data platform — Architect and operate Expansion360 as Ingka's new, trusted data asset to power prioritized expansion use cases (Location Selection, Store Design, Space Optimization, Investment Management, Project Portfolio Management). Design scalable batch and streaming pipelines on GCP (BigQuery, Dataflow/Beam, Pub/Sub, Composer/dbt) to ingest and harmonize the needed internal and external data to build it. Define canonical models, shared schemas, and data contracts as the single source of truth. Map and govern the needed data domains (store profile & location; sales & cost; market & competition; design & layout; financial & cost; project & process; customer & loyalty; store & market fulfillment capabilities) with SLAs and automated quality checks. Run gap analyses, design acquisition/procurement strategies (third-party data, partnerships, collection pipelines), and close the gaps—backed by robust metadata, lineage, and documentation.
• Productionize Expansion intelligence — Enable interactive maps and location analytics by enabling geospatial processing at scale (e.g., BigQuery GIS, H3/S2 indexing, isochrones, nearest neighbor joins). Optimize for fast, exploratory queries and heavy analytical workloads.
• Enable decision and simulation engines — Deliver curated marts and APIs that power scenario planning (e.g., new store P&L, cannibalization/halo, space ROI) and product features (e.g., network optimization simulators, store layout intelligence). Partner with analysts to encode metric definitions and with Data Scientists to serve model inputs/outputs reliably.
• Engineer for reliability and trust — Implement CI/CD for data (dbt tests, contract tests), observability (data quality SLAs, lineage, anomaly detection), access policies (IAM, row/column security), and cost controls. Own SLAs/SLOs for critical datasets and iterate on performance (partitioning, clustering, materializations).
• Harden the foundations — Contribute to shared libraries, templates, and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) to standardize how we build, deploy, and monitor pipelines. Document data contracts and ensure privacy/security best practices are built-in.

Our team within IKEA

You will work in Data & Analytics alongside talented Data Engineers, Data Scientists, Data Analysts, Stewards, and Architects. You'll be embedded in cross-functional product teams with Technology, Product, and Design in Expansion—building the tools that enable IKEA to reach more of the many. Our home base is the Madrid Digital Hub, and we operate as one global team delivering global solutions.

WHAT WE CAN OFFER YOU

• An intellectually stimulating, diverse, and open atmosphere working on hard, high-impact problems that matter.
• Collaboration with world-class peers across Data & Analytics, Product, and Engineering—with space to influence standards and architecture.
• The opportunity to create a measurable, global impact by powering IKEA's store network strategy and expansion of products.
• Modern tooling on Google Cloud Platform and a strong open-source culture.
• Hardware and OS of your choice.
• Continuous learning (we aim to spend ~20% of our time on learning).
• A flexible, friendly, values-led working environment where you can be yourself.

Questions and support? Let's connect

Does this sound like your next challenge? IKEA offers an exciting and empowering work environment in a global workplace, with exceptional opportunities to grow and develop together with us.

In this recruitment, there is no relocation support provided by Ingka, so we are looking for people already living in or within commuting distance of the location.

If you have questions regarding the recruitment, please reach out to Annette Björkquist-Åhstedt at annette.bjorkquist-

Please apply with your application in English; otherwise, we will not be able to process your application.

Please apply with a CV and cover letter stating who you are and why you think you would be a great fit for the role and IKEA. Note that we can't process any applications through email. Thank you