About us

What if your work could drive change in a globally established industry, shaping processes that touch every corner of the world? At Forto, we are at the forefront of change, harnessing the power of AI to revolutionise logistics. We want to reinvent digital supply chains to be transparent, frictionless and sustainable. From day one, our mission has been to simplify global trade – creating a seamless and efficient logistics process.  

About the role

As Data Engineering Manager (f/m/d) at Forto, you’ll be pivotal in enabling our data-driven insights. Your mission is to build a reliable and scalable data backbone, empowering data exchange and ensuring correct, trustworthy data for analysts, scientists, and business users alike. This includes surfacing crucial data like vessel arrival predictions, exchange rates, and airfreight fares, while also highlighting data quality issues in our TMS.

You’ll lead the Data Engineering team’s technical vision and direction, contributing significantly to our overall data strategy. This involves close collaboration with Product, Product Analytics, Engineering Managers, and Business Analysts. You’ll be responsible for building, growing, and managing your team, fostering their development through performance reviews, 1:1s, and goal setting, and guiding them through their agile journey, including breaking down complex initiatives. This role balances people development with core data engineering work, driving organizational growth.

Key Responsibilities

  • Strategic Contribution: Actively contribute to Forto’s overall data strategy, ensuring the data backbone supports current and future business needs.

  • Team Leadership: Build, grow, and manage a highly motivated and engaged team of data engineers. This includes conducting performance reviews, setting goals, providing 1:1 coaching, supporting individual development plans, and addressing performance improvement plans (PIPs) when necessary.

  • Roadmap Delivery: Be ultimately responsible for delivering the Data Engineering team’s roadmap in collaboration with various stakeholders across Business and Tech. Proactively communicate priorities, development status, and any team challenges to stakeholders and management.

  • Software Architecture & Data Quality: Oversee the technical landscape of the data platform, prioritizing initiatives that evolve it towards technical excellence. Guide the team on designing and implementing robust, scalable, and reliable data pipelines and infrastructure, with a strong focus on data quality and surfacing issues.

  • Organizational Development: Balance hands-on team development with broader organizational data initiatives, ensuring alignment and impact across Forto.

  • Agile Development: Guide the team through their agile development journey, facilitating a 2-week sprint process, and effectively breaking down large initiatives into manageable work units.

Required Skills and Experience

  • Increasing seniority in deeply technical Data Engineering roles, with at least 2 years in a people leadership/managerial role.

  • Demonstrable experience building and maintaining reliable and scalable data backbones, including data warehousing, ETL/ELT pipelines, and data lake architectures.

  • Strong understanding and experience with data quality frameworks and methodologies, including surfacing data quality issues.

  • Experience with large-scale architectural patterns, event-driven systems, well-designed APIs, and efficient algorithms, particularly in a data context.

  • Strong exposure to Agile methodologies, with experience in guiding teams through sprint processes.

  • Strong skills with relevant data technologies (e.g., cloud platforms like AWS/GCP, data warehousing solutions like Snowflake/Redshift/BigQuery, ETL tools, message queuing systems, Kubernetes/Docker, SQL/NoSQL databases).

  • Proven ability to contribute to data strategy and work closely with Product, Product Analytics, Senior EM, and Business Analysts.

  • Demonstrated experience in people development, including performance management, goal setting, coaching, and creating development plans.

  • Strong relationship builder and cross-team collaborator.

  • Strong verbal and written communication skills in English.

Preferred Skills and Experience

  • Experience in a fast-paced, start-up, or scale-up environment.

  • Familiarity with data governance and data security best practices.

Don’t fit all of our criteria? That’s okay! We know that you might be hesitant to apply if you don’t meet all our requirements, but here at Forto, we pride ourselves on embracing diverse perspectives and celebrating potential. If you are passionate about this position and the Forto values, please apply anyway. There could be a place for you in this role – or another one that’s a perfect fit! 

Why work with us?

Our team is hard-working, constantly seeking to maximise the impact of their work, but we put our people first, always winning with care. We value efficient systems and swift, direct communication. We want everyone to have their time to speak, so that we can embrace diverse perspectives to help drive towards solutions always.