Data engineering in Manchester
Agencies and retailers in Manchester both run on marketing data, and both know the pain of three dashboards that disagree. Ad platforms, analytics, the shop, the CRM and the email tool all count a sale differently, and the monthly report is built by hand from exports. When a client asks why the numbers changed, the honest answer is often that nobody knows.
We build the pipeline that lands all of it once, in a warehouse you own, with one agreed definition of a customer, an order and a conversion. Loads run on a schedule, fail loudly when a source changes its format, and keep a history so last month's figures do not quietly move. On FM360 we run hourly syncs into ClickHouse, and the lesson was to normalise every value at the boundary before comparing anything.
Manchester's software market has two centres of gravity, a tram ride apart. MediaCityUK in Salford is home to BBC North and ITV, and to the production companies, post houses and broadcast suppliers that grew up around them. Their systems are about media and rights: asset libraries, scheduling, metadata that has to follow a programme from edit to broadcast to streaming, and the comments, votes and uploads that now come with so many shows. Anything that hosts what the public posts needs moderation designed in from the first episode, because the busiest night is usually the launch.
The other centre is online retail. Greater Manchester is home to THG, boohoo, AO and Auto Trader, and that concentration has produced a generation of engineers and smaller brands who think in conversion rates, warehouse cut-offs and peak trading. The mid-sized retailers we hear from have usually outgrown their first platform in stages, and the joins between the shop, the warehouse and the finance system are where the money leaks. Between the broadcasters and the retailers sit the city's digital agencies, building for clients across the North and London, and they often need engineering capacity for a quarter rather than another permanent seat.
Hiring here is cheaper than London but not cheap. ITJobsWatch puts the median advertised salary for a software engineer in Manchester at £75,000 over the six months to September 2026, and GCHQ, which opened its Manchester site in 2019, now competes for the same security-minded engineers. Retailers and agencies feel the squeeze most in the run-up to peak, when a build has a fixed date and a permanent hire would arrive after it.
Working with us from Manchester fits the day you already have. Four hours of every working day overlap with yours, set across your morning, so stand-up, review and decisions happen live with the engineer who writes the code. The afternoon runs on pull requests and written updates in your own Slack, GitHub and Linear, waiting for you when you get back from lunch, with runbooks and architecture notes written as the work goes.
We are the right fit for a defined build, a deadline before peak, or a quarter of extra senior capacity for an agency that has won more work than it can staff. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece and judge us on the result. For agencies, we work white-label under your name, in your repositories and your tools.
Four ways this arrives.
Two definitions of the same metric, computed in two places. We pick one, write it as a tested model in version control, and point every report at it, so the argument moves from whose number is right to what the definition should be.
A job reports success while the report still shows yesterday. We give every table a written freshness guarantee, monitor what the reader actually sees rather than the job that feeds it, and alert a person when the guarantee is missed.
A CRM, an ERP or a work-order tool reachable only through its API. We build the sync with retries, rate limits and normalisation at the boundary, and keep append-only snapshots so last Tuesday is a query rather than a restore.
Analytical queries running against the application database at the worst possible moment. We move them to a columnar store, keep Postgres for transactions, and feed one from the other by change data capture or scheduled extracts, whichever the freshness requirement calls for.
A nightly work-order extract into append-only ClickHouse snapshots, with a verifier that reads the live Tableau dashboard to prove it shows the newest data.
Read the write-up →Asked by Manchester teams.
How do you work with teams in Manchester?+
Four hours of every working day overlap with yours, set across your Manchester morning, so stand-up and review happen live. We join your calls and work in your tools: Slack, GitHub and Linear. You talk directly to the engineer who writes the code. When you get back from lunch, the afternoon's work is waiting in pull requests, with notes on what changed and why, and runbooks written as we go.
Do you build for Manchester retailers and media companies?+
Yes. For online retailers we build the joins that decide the margin: stock that is right across the website, marketplaces and warehouse, returns that flow back into sellable stock, and order data that reconciles with the 3PL and the payment provider. For broadcasters and suppliers at MediaCityUK we build content and rights metadata services, delivery APIs for streaming partners, and audience features with moderation designed in.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Manchester?+
ITJobsWatch puts the median advertised salary for a software engineer in Manchester at around £75,000. Our published rate is $35/hour with a $5,000 minimum, or $5,400 a month for one engineer embedded in your team. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and we can start within days of the first call. A fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800 lets you judge us on output first.
Can you take over a platform a Manchester agency built?+
Yes. In Manchester a retail or media platform often outlives the agency that built it, so this is familiar work. After a 30-minute call with the engineer, we read the code, run it, and write down how it actually works: architecture notes, the risky paths and what we would change first. That becomes a written plan within a week. A fixed-price two-week piece then ships the first real change.
Do we need a data warehouse yet?+
Maybe not. If your reporting runs comfortably against a Postgres read replica, a warehouse adds a second system to pay for and keep in step. The signs you need one: analytical queries slowing the product, data from several sources that has to be joined, or history you must keep that the application overwrites. We will tell you which side of that line you are on.
Why ClickHouse rather than Snowflake or BigQuery?+
Not always. For steady, high-volume analytical work, ClickHouse is fast and cheap to run, self-hosted or on its managed cloud, and we run it in production. Snowflake and BigQuery ask less of you operationally and suit ad hoc querying across a large team. If nobody on your side wants to operate a database, we will recommend the managed option even when the invoice is larger.
What does a freshness guarantee actually mean?+
A written statement per table or report, such as "never more than an hour behind" or "reflects yesterday's close by 07:00". Each one has a check that measures it and an alert that fires when it is missed. Without it, stale data looks exactly like correct data until somebody makes a decision on it.
Can you work with the tools we already have?+
Usually, yes. If you already run dbt, Airflow, Fivetran or a BI tool your team knows, we build inside it. We suggest replacing a tool only when it is the cause of the problem you hired us for, and we show you the evidence before asking you to fund a migration.
How do you handle personal data in the warehouse?+
We decide what should reach the warehouse at all before building the pipeline. Identifiers can be hashed or tokenised at ingestion, sensitive columns restricted by role, and retention enforced by the pipeline itself. Every field is documented from source to dashboard, so anyone can see where a number came from and who can read it.