Data Engineer; FTC

Position: Data Engineer (18 Months FTC)
Directorate:
Strategy & Innovation
Contract Type: 18 Months Fixed Term Contract

Hours:

36
Salary: £48,003 - £53,172

Location:

Colindale
Closing Date:
Midnight March 9th 2026

About Barnet Council
Barnet is a borough with much to be proud of. Our excellent schools, vibrant town centres, vast green spaces and diverse communities all help make it a great place to live and work. As a council we want to build on these strengths as we move into the future. We are growing and developing as an organisation to meet the challenges facing our borough and we are committed to working with partner organisations and residents to make Barnet even better.

As an organisation, our staff are committed to Our Values:
Learning to Improve, Caring, Inclusive, Collaborative - which drive everything we do.

About the role
This is an exciting time to join Barnet as we grow our Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) capabilities and accelerate our digital transformation journey. We're investing in smarter services, better use of data, modern technology, and you'll play a key part in shaping this future.

We're looking for a Data Engineer to join our Insight & Intelligence Hub, working with a talented team to help design, build and maintain the data infrastructure that powers our analytics, AI and insight functions.
You'll work across the organisation to integrate complex datasets, improve data quality, and create robust data pipelines that enable our analysts and data scientists to deliver highvalue insight for services and residents.
This is a handson technical role where you'll work with modern cloud technologies, large scale data systems and cutting edge tools to support predictive analytics, machine learning initiatives and enterprise reporting.
If you're excited by engineering challenge, modern data platforms and solving realworld problems, you'll be a great fit.
This is a hybrid role. You will be expected to attend monthly in-person team days in our Colindale office.
We also come into the office to meet service stakeholders, work together on collaboration, discovery and user testing sessions and department days.
Please  to download the Job description for this role.

About you
You're an experienced and adaptable data engineering professional who enjoys creating welldesigned, efficient and reliable data solutions. You're comfortable working with complex systems, experimenting with new tools and collaborating with colleagues across technical and nontechnical teams.

You will bring:
- Strong handson experience with modern data engineering tools and practices, including ETL/ELT, data warehousing and data modelling.
- Expertise in cloud data platforms, ideally Azure services such as Data Factory, Synapse, Databricks, Spark or Snowflake.
- Proficiency in Python, SQL and other relevant languages for building pipelines and enabling automation.
- Experience building and managing production data services, integrating data from multiple systems, and improving data quality.
- Understanding of data governance, security, information management and UK GDPR.
- The ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly for nonspecialist audiences.
- A collaborative and proactive approach, with confidence leading projects, supporting partners and driving continuous improvement.
If you enjoy solving complex data challenges and playing a leading role in a growing data function, this is an excellent opportunity.
In this role, you will:
- Develop and maintain the council's Microsoft Azure Data Platform, supporting cloud ready, scalable analytics.
- Build and optimise data pipelines, APIs and integrations across onpremise, cloud and supplierhosted systems.
- Extract, clean, transform and combine data from a wide range of operational systems to create high quality datasets for insight and machine learning.
- Work with data scientists to design and maintain pipelines for AI/ML models, including supporting feature engineering, labelling and large scale data flows.
- Automate manual data processes to improve speed, reliability and accessibility of insight.
- Lead data engineering projects, including working with external suppliers and supporting more junior colleagues.
- Implement and maintain data lakehouse architectures, master data management and metadata repositories.
- Ensure that data workflows comply with security, privacy and governance standards, including anonymisation where required.
- Optimise the performance of code, pipelines and data systems, resolving issues, bugs and outages.
- Contribute to the development of data strategy, standards and reusable engineering frameworks across the Hub.
- Work with colleagues across ICT, Connected Places and service teams to join up data and support emerging technologies (e.g., IoT, geospatial, AI).
- Support the creation of visualisations and reusable analytical products that enhance decision making.
You'll be part of a forward looking team that values continuous learning, experimentation and innovation, helping Barnet…