Do you get energy from turning a fast-growing stream of data into a platform the whole business can build on — and from leading the team that makes it happen?

If you're a hands-on data leader who thinks in architecture rather than just tools, and who wants full ownership of a platform end to end, the Head of Data role at TBAuctions might be for you.

We’re driven by our commitment to value, transparency, and innovation. Our goal is to deliver exceptional auction experiences to both bidders and sellers, while continuously improving how we work. Our team is collaborative and diverse, but we share key traits: we’re customer-focused, results-oriented, and unafraid to make bold decisions. We're hands-on, proactive, and always looking to make a positive impact.

About the role

As Head of Data, you own the company's data platform: making sure data is ingested, processed, governed and made available reliably and securely for analytics, AI, machine learning and operational applications. You lead the Data Platform Engineering team and are accountable for both the team's growth and the platform's operational excellence.

We're invested in Databricks and Azure today, but we're looking for someone who thinks beyond the current stack — in terms of architecture, engineering practices, open source opportunities and long-term capability building. You report to the CFO.

What you will do

Own the technical direction of the data platform, including its infrastructure and budget
Develop a roadmap that balances business priorities with long-term platform investments, and make the architectural calls that keep it scalable, secure and maintainable
Lead ingestion and integration of data from internal platforms, SaaS applications, ERP/CRM systems, APIs and third-party sources, and build and operate reliable batch and streaming pipelines
Develop and maintain our Medallion (bronze/silver/gold) architecture, and evolve the gold layer to better serve day-to-day data and BI needs
Implement platform-wide governance — metadata management, cataloguing, lineage and access controls — in partnership with Security and Architecture to keep us GDPR and security compliant
Enable ML & AI workloads through scalable pipelines and high-quality datasets, and build self-service capabilities for analysts and power users
Lead and develop the Data Platform Engineering team, setting engineering standards, coding practices and delivery priorities

What you bring

You think like an architect and work like an engineer: you can set a long-term technical direction and still get into the details of a Spark job or a pipeline that's misbehaving. You've led engineering teams before, and you know how to turn a roadmap into shipped, reliable infrastructure. You partner naturally with Product, Engineering, Machine Learning, Architecture, Security and business stakeholders, and you bring the same pragmatism to picking battles as you do to picking technology.

8+ years in Data Engineering or Data Platform roles, including 3+ years leading engineering teams, with experience operating enterprise-scale data platforms in production
Strong knowledge of Apache Spark internals (shuffling, driver vs. executor architecture, lazy evaluation) and experience building reliable, production-grade ELT/ETL pipelines
Experience designing architectures that combine batch and streaming processing (e.g. Lambda or Kappa), including checkpointing, state management, exactly-once semantics and watermarking
Experience with CDC technologies such as Debezium
Strong experience with Databricks or a comparable lakehouse platform, and with data modeling frameworks such as Kimball dimensional modeling
Experience implementing Medallion Architecture using a transformation tool such as dbt
Experience with cloud platforms (Azure preferred; AWS or GCP acceptable) and Infrastructure as Code (e.g. Terraform) and CI/CD pipelines
Experience with data catalogs, data masking techniques and data governance platforms (DataHub, Atlan, OpenMetadata)

Technical skills

Databricks, Apache Spark (Spark SQL, PySpark), Apache Kafka, Apache Airflow
Table formats: Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg
Kubernetes — deploying and maintaining stateful services (e.g. OpenMetadata)
Prometheus & Grafana
Git and DevOps practices (CI/CD)

What we offer you

Independent and varied role within an entrepreneurial and innovative organization
Yearly salary €90,000 - €110,000
Good pension scheme
Bonus scheme (up to 1 gross monthly salary per year)
25 vacation days
Laptop and iPhone
Training opportunities
Working in a team of professionals, where hard work is well combined with humor

TBAuctions (TBA) is Europe’s leading digital auction platform for B2B used industrial equipment. Our team of 1200+ employees in eight brands in the Benelux, the Nordics, the UK, and Continental Europe serve buyers in 170 countries. We are extending the life of business goods, maximizing their value and sustainability; we facilitate the circular economy. With our proprietary intelligent auctioning platform, we make buying and selling more effective and efficient by using technology, AI, automation, and economies of scale. TBA’s digital auctions make this happen by creating a cross-border platform that perfectly matches the demand and supply of used business goods. Together with our brands, Klaravik, Troostwijk Auctions, Surplex, Auksjonen, PS Auctions, British Medical Auctions, Vavato, HT Auctions & Valuations, and Auktionshuset dab, TBA brings sustainable trade to a higher level. Sourcing locally and selling globally, 2.2M lots are auctioned annually as our websites receive 177M visits and 750K unique bidders per year. Our motto: “Everything Has Value.” Funds managed by Castik Capital are the majority owners of TBAuctions, with Summa Equity as the minority shareholder.

Head of Data