Data Engineer

Location: Altrincham, WA14 5UW
–
hybrid (minimum 2 days p/w in office) after initial office based onboarding period

Hours
: Full-time
, Mon-Fri, 9:00-17:00

Start date: ASAP (flexible and open to longer notice periods)

PLS Solicitors is a well-established and growing law firm with a strong reputation within the conveyancing industry and significant ongoing investment in technology, AI, and platform modernisation.

We are building an AI centre of excellence internally whilst re-architecting parts of our technology estate away from legacy systems towards a modern technology platform on Azure. As part of this growth, we’re now looking for a Data Engineer to take ownership of the data foundation behind our AI, reporting and future technology platforms.

This is a newly created role, giving you the opportunity to take ownership of an area that hasn’t previously had a dedicated Data Engineer. Data sits at the heart of our AI products, reporting and wider technology transformation, and you’ll play a key role in making sure it is reliable, secure and fit for the future.

The overall data strategy is already defined by our IT Director. Your role is to run with it – turning the strategy into working pipelines and platforms, owning the data engineering estate day-to-day and helping refine it as our technology develops.

You’ll report to our Head of Development, working closely with our AI Developer and colleagues across the wider technology team. You’ll have plenty to get your teeth into from day one, from improving our existing data warehouse and reporting environment to building the new data foundations behind our AI strategy. We’re looking for someone who wants genuine ownership and responsibility, and who wants to see the tangible impact of their work.

• Deliver our data strategy: how we extract case data from our case management estate, where it lands, and what the target data platform looks like are questions the strategy answers. Your job is to run with the strategy, build what it describes, and support and refine it as the estate evolves.
• Design least-privilege, read-only access patterns and query workloads that never put load on the live production system the firm depends on.
• Build and maintain the datasets our AI work depends on, including taking our golden dataset of completed matters from a manual exercise to a versioned, access-controlled, anonymised and repeatable pipeline, along with the evaluation data that tells us whether our AI is getting better.
• Replace a legacy management information warehouse built on stored procedures with modern, documented pipelines and reporting that is trusted throughout the business.
• Support the data needs of new platform builds and integrations as our legacy estate is replaced.
• Monitor data quality, lineage, retention and pseudonymisation to a standard that stands up in a regulated firm handling sensitive client data.
• Maintain documentation so your pipelines and datasets are well understood and can be built upon by others.
• Stay current with data engineering tooling and practice, identifying opportunities to improve how we manage and move data

We're looking for an experienced, hands‑on Data Engineer who enjoys ownership rather than simply being given tickets to complete. We'd expect you to have around 4-6+ years of genuine hands‑on Data Engineering experience, although we’re much more interested in what you’ve actually owned and delivered than the number of years on your CV.

• Strong SQL – genuinely comfortable with complex queries, performance tuning, data modelling and stored procedures, with the judgement to understand the impact of querying production systems
• Python for data pipeline…