Data Engineer

Employment Type: Permanent or 12-Month Fixed-Term Contract

Travel: Remote with occasional travel (approximately one day per month) to Leeds or Newcastle

Security Clearance:
Active SC Clearance required

At Amber Labs, we're a people-first technology consultancy delivering innovative digital services that help organisations solve complex challenges. We work with multidisciplinary teams across the public sector, partnering with our clients to deliver secure, scalable, and user-centred technology solutions.

Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do. We foster an inclusive and supportive culture where knowledge sharing, continuous learning, and engineering excellence are encouraged. Our teams are empowered to challenge ideas, innovate, and deliver meaningful outcomes in environments where quality and trust matter.

We're looking for an experienced Senior Data Engineer to join our growing data practice. If you're passionate about modern cloud-based data engineering, enjoy mentoring others, and thrive in Agile delivery environments, we'd love to hear from you.

As a Senior Data Engineer, you'll design, build, and operate robust data platforms that power mission-critical analytics within a complex UK Government environment.

Working closely with architects, engineers, product teams, and stakeholders, you'll develop scalable data pipelines, modernise legacy data platforms, and ensure high standards of engineering across the full software delivery lifecycle. You'll also play an important role in mentoring colleagues and helping shape engineering best practices.

A strong background in AWS
, Py Spark , and Informatica is essential, alongside experience delivering secure, scalable data solutions within UK Central Government.

• Design, build, and maintain production-grade data pipelines using AWS services including Amazon EMR, S3 and Lambda.
• Develop scalable data processing solutions using PySpark, Python and SQL with a focus on performance, resilience, testing and observability.
• Lead the migration and modernisation of legacy ETL and reporting workloads into cloud-native architectures.
• Develop reusable data engineering components and shared frameworks.
• Build and optimise data transformations and models supporting Management Information (MI), reporting and analytics, including downstream Power BI solutions.
• Work with Informatica as part of enterprise data integration and migration activities.
• Own engineering best practices including CI/CD, automated testing, version control and release governance.
• Conduct code reviews and mentor engineers, promoting high-quality engineering standards across delivery teams.
• Collaborate with architects, product owners and platform teams to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions.
• Participate fully in Agile ceremonies using Jira and Confluence.
• Embed security, governance and compliance throughout the engineering lifecycle, ensuring solutions meet UK Government security and data handling requirements.

We're looking for someone with strong technical expertise combined with excellent communication and collaboration skills.

You'll have:

• Active SC Security Clearance (essential).
• Proven experience delivering data engineering solutions within UK Central Government.
• Strong commercial experience with Informatica.
• Hands‑on expertise with AWS services including Amazon EMR, S3 and Lambda.
• Advanced PySpark, Python and SQL skills for large‑scale data processing.
• Experience building and maintaining enterprise‑scale batch data pipelines.
• Strong understanding of cloud‑native data engineering architectures.
• Experience modernising legacy ETL platforms and migrating workloads to AWS.
• Experience implementing CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and automated testing.
• Strong knowledge of Git/Git Lab, branching strategies and code review practices.
• Experience designing and consuming APIs for secure data integration.
• Strong understanding of data quality, governance and engineering best practices.
• Experience working in Agile delivery teams using Jira and Confluence.
• Excellent stakeholder management skills, with the ability to communicate…