Data Engineer

Our client manufactures fresh and slow-cooked meat products for the food industry, supplying a portfolio of brands from its established Irish operation. Founded in 1981 and headquartered in Clonee, the organisation combines large-scale food production with multi-site operational complexity, creating a substantial environment for data-led planning, performance management, and continuous improvement.

Operating within food and beverage manufacturing, this organisation relies on accurate information to coordinate production, understand performance, and support decisions across its brands and facilities. Its Preston-based data function will contribute to strengthening the systems and analytical foundations that connect operational activity with measurable business outcomes.

As Data Engineer, you will design, build, and enhance the data foundations supporting production planning analytics across a complex food manufacturing environment. The position carries substantial ownership, with responsibility for turning information from enterprise systems, legacy applications, and external services into dependable, accessible, and well-structured data assets.

Success will involve delivering robust pipelines, well-designed data models, and practical semantic layers that enable trusted analysis and clearer operational decisions. Working with considerable autonomy, you will help shape greenfield capability while ensuring that engineering standards, data quality, and maintainability remain appropriate for a growing analytics landscape.

Based in Preston, you will work across business and technical contexts, translating operational requirements into scalable engineering solutions. Your contribution will support production planning and may extend to data needs across wider UK operations, making this a visible role within the organisation’s continued development of its data capability.

• Design and deliver greenfield data engineering solutions for production planning analytics.
• Build, monitor, and improve reliable ETL processes and data pipelines.
• Integrate information from D365, legacy platforms, external APIs, and other operational sources.
• Develop logical and physical data models that support consistent reporting and analysis.
• Create and maintain semantic models that make complex operational data usable for business stakeholders.
• Apply strong SQL and Python practices to transform, validate, and manage data efficiently.
• Work independently from discovery through delivery, taking accountability for quality, documentation, and outcomes.
• Identify opportunities to extend data engineering support across Preston and other UK manufacturing locations.

• Professional experience delivering data engineering solutions in a commercial environment.
• Practical experience with Microsoft Fabric and its associated data engineering capabilities.
• Strong Python skills for data processing, automation, and pipeline development.
• Advanced SQL capability, including query optimisation and complex transformation logic.
• Hands-on experience designing and maintaining ETL workflows and production data pipelines.
• Proven ability to create data models that support reliable analytical and reporting use cases.
• Experience developing semantic models for business intelligence and self-service analysis.
• Confidence integrating data from enterprise platforms, legacy systems, APIs, and varied source formats.
• Ability to work autonomously, structure ambiguous requirements, and deliver maintainable solutions.
• Strong communication skills, with the judgement to explain technical decisions in an operational context.

• Meaningful ownership of a greenfield data engineering agenda with direct relevance to production…