Data Engineer (Security Clearance Required)

Please do not apply unless you are eligible for Security Clearance or already have Security Clearance. Ineligible candidates will be automatically rejected. Security Clearance requirements are listed at the bottom of the job description.

Salary: £50-55,000

Location: Remote, some in-office presence intermittently required

Start: September 2026

Summary: Counter, a consultancy brand under the Northcoders group, helps clients attract, onboard, upskill and integrate graduates into their businesses, providing them with a seamless start to long and successful careers. Counter teams are formed for our clients by deploying a Counter Tech Lead to work within the client’s organisation to hire appropriate team members from graduate and professional communities and collaborate directly on the clients' projects. We provide support, extra training, and guidance to fast-track individuals' journeys within that organisation. For this engagement, Counter has been contracted to provide a team and will support a Government Department. Successful applicants will be offered a flexible fixed-term contract by Counter. At the end of that period, there may be an opportunity to apply for full-time roles at the client site. Please check your commuting distance and viability before applying.

About the Client: The client is in the process of modernising core digital platforms and services.

The Role: What We are Looking For

As a Data Engineer, you will play an important role in supporting live data services while contributing to platform improvements and automation initiatives. We are particularly interested in candidates who:

• Have experience with Pentaho, databases, and SQL
• Are user-focused and comfortable engaging with stakeholders
• Enjoy problem-solving in fast-paced environments
• Show strong collaboration skills and eagerness to learn

Responsibilities:

• Have a deep appreciation of reproducible CI/CD pipelines which include automated tests, and know how to deploy end-to-end to Production environments.
• Have a deep working knowledge of their chosen programming language and related toolsets.
• Have applied software engineering best practices and design principles to data pipelines.
• Understand the security implications related to developing and operating data processing platforms.
• Have a breadth of experience across data tech and choose the right tool for the right job.
• Understand data changes at scale, ensure data quality at all stages, and apply the fundamentals of data modelling based on usage.
• Be able to craft high-quality, resilient Data Pipelines for ingesting, transforming, and exporting data.
• Critically evaluate and choose appropriate orchestration/choreography tools, exploit parallelism and pushdown/offload, build in monitoring, and follow functional data engineering principles.
• Craft views and queries that answer analytical questions in a concise and efficient manner using SQL.
• Have deep experience of at least one, preferably more, SQL dialects.
• Analyse and optimise queries and understand their dependence on indexing and partitioning.
• Effectively decompose complex data projections using CTEs.
• Have an appreciation of key data governance concerns and experience in designing and implementing solutions for them.
• Be willing to help others and capable of pairing with them.
• Seek peer review on work and consider processes, clients' needs as well as technology when working.
• Have good interpersonal skills.
• Understand the practices and principles underpinning agile software development.
• Able to adjust their ways of working based on the client’s maturity.