Data Engineer

Job title:

Data Engineer

Location:

Surrey (Hybrid working)
Type:
Permanent
Salary: £50,000-£75,000
Visa sponsorship:
Not available

A UK-based technology business building advanced data-driven capability for a government-facing mission. The team works with real-world sensor and geospatial data at scale, across cloud and edge/on‑prem environments, and is growing due to increased demand and new programmes.

The role

We're hiring a Data Engineer to design, build and run scalable data pipelines and data models that turn multiple complex sources into reliable, accessible datasets for analytics and machine learning. You'll support batch, streaming and interactive use cases, including modern approaches such as image embeddings and LLM-enabled conversational analytics.

You'll work closely with data scientists, analysts, software engineers and platform engineers in an agile (Kanban) environment. The platform operates across Microsoft Azure plus edge and on‑prem deployments.

What you'll do

Build and maintain robust batch + streaming pipelines (ingestion, transformation, orchestration)
Monitor and support production data services; investigate data quality, reliability and performance issues through to resolution
Develop reusable platform components, internal libraries and tooling to improve engineering productivity
Implement automated testing, validation checks and integration plans for pipelines and data products
Design data models and storage patterns supporting analytics, ML features, embeddings and conversational querying
Document data flows, schemas, operational processes and technical decisions

What we're looking for (must-have)

Strong Python (clean, maintainable, production-grade data engineering code)
Strong SQL and experience designing relational + analytical data models

Experience with structured/time-series/high-volume storage (e.g., SQL databases, InfluxDB or similar)
Experience building batch and event-driven/streaming data pipelines
~3+ years' experience in a data engineering / data platform team
Familiarity with distributed processing (e.g., Spark, Flink, or similar)
Orchestration tooling to schedule/monitor/recover pipelines
Understanding of event-driven architecture, message brokers and stream-processing patterns
Hands-on with Azure data services and cloud data platform patterns
Comfortable building/debugging Docker containers
Experience deploying/operating data workloads on Kubernetes (cloud/edge/on‑prem)
Experience developing/consuming APIs for ingestion, access and integration
Strong attention to detail; able to prioritise independently; solid communicator

Nice to have

Degree in CS / data engineering / maths (or equivalent experience)
TileDB (or similar multidimensional/geospatial/scientific data tech)
Geospatial + time-series + image/vector search experience (embeddings)
Exposure to RAG / LLM conversational analytics or ML data pipelines
Experience designing for intermittently connected edge environments

Benefits (summary)

Bonus scheme
Private healthcare + cash plan
Life assurance (4x salary)
Share options