Data Engineer, AI & Data, Defence & Security (DV clearance required) in City of London

City of London, United Kingdom | Posted on 05/02/2026

Contract Start Date: March 2026

Contract Length: 12 months, with potential extension

Contract Classification: Inside IR25

Contract Location: London, Bristol or Manchester with hybrid working (2/3 days in the office)

Mandatory requirement: Must have DV Clearance

Role Overview

We are proud of the impact we have with our Defence & Security clients, the strength of our relationships, and the variety of our skills and expertise that we bring to help them achieve their mission. We’re growing our teams across all of Technology and Transformation. If you are cleared DV level, we are very keen to hear from you.

As a practitioner, you are responsible for bridging the gap between our customers' needs and technical solutions. Your primary responsibility is to make data valuable for our clients, by developing pipelines that ingest, transform, and enrich high volume and variety data into accessible, trusted information assets that can be used to derive actionable insights. In your role, you will have responsibility for deliverables and client stakeholder relationships and will be delivering solutions for our clients using agile methodologies. You will often be working in multi-disciplinary teams across a range of industries, subject matters, and locations.

Responsibilities

• Apply data engineering tools, integration frameworks, and query engines to create high quality, standardised data for downstream use cases, such as for AI and reporting.
• Design and implement high quality data pipelines and data stores, coordinating efforts with other developers and engineers.
• Bring innovation and novel approaches to solve challenging data engineering problems.
• Architect and implement for scale and complexity that provide value across many teams and consumers.
• Develop logical and physical data modeling and governance strategy, establishing standards across teams.

Required Skills & Experience

• All applicants must hold UK security clearance to Developed Vetting level.
• Distributed computing techniques like parallel processing, streaming, batch workflow orchestration that enable handling large data volumes.
• ETL, data pipelines, and automated workflows for moving and processing data.
• Optimising data systems for performance, scalability, reliability, and monitoring.
• Information security including access controls, encryption, anonymity for sensitive data assets.
• Data governance, including metadata management, data quality, and lineage tracking.

We are specifically looking for candidates with both technical and business focused skills, who can articulate the outcomes and value of their work, and have working experience in some of the following:

• End to end development experience with data pipelines, ETL processes, workflow orchestration - using core concepts that apply across tech stacks.
• Working with diverse data sources and types - batch, streaming, real-time, and unstructured.
• Systems thinking and architectural design skills for building scalable, high-performance data solutions.
• Data modelling, warehouse design, database optimization knowledge - with samples of logical/physical models that reflect proficiency.
• Deploying, and managing distributed data systems.
• Ability to monitor, troubleshoot, and tune these systems for reliability and performance.
• Coding experience that demonstrates modularity, reusability, and efficiency - across languages.
• Understanding full development lifecycle, SDLC concepts, version control, CI/CD pipelines.
• Knowledge of data security, governance, metadata management, master data principles.
• Communication skills, ability to understand business requirements and translate to technical data solutions.