Data Engineer

Ascent Flight Training (Management) Ltd

Competitive Salary Part-time Permanent

This role is offered on a part-time basis, for a minimum of 3 days per week.

Ascent Flight Training is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Babcock International, responsible for delivering the UK Military Flying Training System (UKMFTS). We train the next generation of Royal Air Force, Royal Navy, and Army pilots, using advanced aircraft, simulators, and training systems.

Design and deliver robust, scalable data systems and infrastructure that power the organisation’s analytics, AI, and decision-making capabilities.

By enabling governed data integration, transformation, and storage, this role ensures teams across the business have timely access to trusted, high-quality data, to unlock strategic insights, drive efficiency and support business growth.

The role will support strategic programmes by engineering trusted, governed data foundations that enable performance dashboards, predictive analytics, end-to-end training insight, and integration between Ascent data services, supplier-developed solutions and customer requirements.

Design, implement, and maintain a data foundation for business analytics. Implement workflows to ingest data from diverse sources, transform it for analytical use, and load it into data warehouses, data lakes, or marts. For strategic programmes, support ongoing data capture, outcome tracking and repeatable analytical datasets that enable evidence-led decision‑making.

Configure, maintain and optimise Ascent data‑engine capabilities to import, transform, validate and export data in agreed formats, enabling integration with internal and supplier‑developed dashboards, analytical tools and programme reporting outputs.

Continuously monitor data infrastructure, pipelines, and data models to identify bottlenecks and optimise performance, scalability, and reliability of data solutions.

Ensure robust data governance practices are in place, including data lineage, metadata management, and adherence to data privacy and compliance standards.

Stay current with emerging data engineering tools, cloud platforms, and best practices. Proactively identify opportunities to improve data workflows, reduce latency, and enhance the overall efficiency of data operations.

Partner with cross-functional teams, including data analysts, business stakeholders, and ICT to understand data requirements, communicate solutions clearly, and ensure alignment to business objectives.

• SQL and Database Management
  : Essential experience required: Advanced expertise in SQL for querying, transforming, and managing data in relational databases. Skilled in database design, performance optimisation, and maintaining data integrity across new and existing database solutions. Knowledge of SSIS.
• Data Warehouse Concepts
  : Essential experience required: Knowledge and understanding of data warehousing principles and methodologies e.g. Kimball. Including dimensional modelling, star and snowflake schemas, incremental extracts and data integration techniques.
• Desirable experience:
  Knowledge of data warehousing tools and technologies such as Snowflake, Databricks, Azure Synapse.
• Programming and Scripting
  : Essential experience required: Knowledge and understanding of programming languages such as Python, Spark, DAX, C# or Java for data manipulation, transformation, and automation tasks. Azure Dev Ops / Git Hub / Visual Studio for code repositories, change management.
• Desirable experience:
  Knowledge of scripting languages like Power Shell for process automation.
• Data Governance, Security/Privacy & Ethics
  : Essential experience required: Strong understanding of data governance principles, data security, privacy regulations (including GDPR), and ethical data practices. Experienced in implementing access controls, encryption, and ensuring compliance with data protection standards.
• ETL…