Data engineer in education

At our heart, we are the department opportunity. We enable children and learners to thrive, by protecting the vulnerable and ensuring the delivery of excellent standards of education, training and care. Data is integral to achieve this vision and the roles on offer are part of the Data Directorate within DfE. As a directorate, we provide a full range of data sourcing, management, governance, sharing, statistics, and visualisation capabilities and products to users across DfE, the education sector, cross-government, and citizens. We’re seeking highly capable Data Engineers to help us achieve our vision.

• Work as part of a multidisciplinary team in a large and complex data environment to design, build, and deliver high performance, secure, scalable data solutions - adapting and embedding practices such as CI/CD and DevOps.
• Partner with the product owners, business analysts, architects, test engineers, and data analysts to understand data needs, and deliver on those needs.
• Lead and build complex data engineering solutions for data products.
• Work on Azure cloud-based tech stack, Databricks, Pyspark, Informatica DEI.
• Ensure the stability, robustness and resilience of the products you build, and be in a position to affect changes to those products where necessary.
• Coach and mentor junior members of the team to support their professional development.
• Help build and maintain our data engineering community to facilitate knowledge sharing, innovation, and collaboration across the department.
• Above all, you will be proactive and want to make an impact, and this may sometimes involve challenging current methods.

• Designing, building, and performance tuning complex data pipelines and can manage all data engineering activities required to deliver a data product on any of the following cloud platforms – Azure, AWS, Google Cloud.
• Proficiency in two or more of the following – SQL, Python, Apache Spark (Pyspark, Spark SQL).
• Working with structured and unstructured data, data lakes, large data warehouses to service complex operational and analytical business needs.
• Implementing latest tools and technologies, including migrating to and implementing modern data architectures, such as lake houses, cloud data warehouses etc.
• Delivering through Agile/DevOps working practices in multi-disciplinary teams – CI/CD, Scrum, Automation.
• Managing and improving data quality issues including root-cause analysis and recommending/implementing data quality improvement strategies.
• Managing team dynamics and facilitating difficult discussions within the team or with a diverse set of stakeholders.
• Будет плюсом: Databricks, Informatica DEI and Azure Data Factory; Developing complex data models; Developing machine learning solutions

• Alongside your salary of £60,222, Department for Education contributes £17,446 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme.
• As a member of the DfE, you will be entitled to join the highly competitive Civil Service Pension Scheme, which many experts agree is one of the most generous in the UK.
• You will have 25 days leave, increasing by 1 day every year to a maximum of 30 days after five years’ service. In addition, all staff receive the King’s Birthday privilege holiday and 8 days’ bank and public holidays.
• We offer flexible working arrangements, such as job sharing, term-time working, flexi-time and compressed hours.
• Most DfE employees will be working a hybrid pattern, spending at least 60% of their time in an office or work setting.
• As an organisation, which exists to support education and lifelong learning, we offer our staff excellent professional development opportunities.
• This is a discretionary non-consolidated, non-pensionable allowance which, if awarded, is attached to the post. The value of the allowance is based on the outcome of a capability assessment and is reviewed annually. Allowance values range up to £19,400 with the highest values reserved for candidates whose capability is above the expected level for all of the skills.