Senior Data Engineer

Make a difference and advance your career by helping deliver some of the UK’s most important #tech4good projects, making the world a smarter, safer, greener, and healthier place. You’ll join a talented team of dynamic and driven professional problem solvers; creative thinkers and solutions builders who thrive on helping clients meet the most exciting digital transformation challenges.

Founded in 1992, we are a successful, growing International digital transformation consultancy. We deliver multi-Queen’s Award for innovation winning platforms and services that support large-scale digital transformation. Our digital, data and technology solutions are used by globally recognised public and private sector brands operating in a variety of sectors including Civil Defence, Healthcare, Sustainable Environment and Land Asset Management, and Digital Democracy.

About the role: As a Senior Data Engineer at Informed Solutions, you’ll take a leading role in designing, building, and delivering robust data platforms and pipelines that underpin critical public sector services. Your work will enable better decision‑making, improve service outcomes, and help create a healthier, safer, and more sustainable UK. You’ll be part of a collaborative, high‑performing team, taking ownership of end‑to‑end delivery on greenfield and transformation programmes while guiding and supporting colleagues to deliver high‑quality data solutions.

Working closely with Software Engineering, User‑Centred Design, Data Science, Delivery Management, and Live Services, you’ll help shape enterprise‑scale data platforms for high‑profile clients, influencing technical direction and driving innovation. As a technology‑agnostic consultancy, we empower you to design the right data solutions for each challenge. With technologies spanning Python, SQL, cloud‑native data services, streaming platforms, and modern data tooling across AWS, Azure and GCP, you’ll have opportunities to deepen your expertise, explore new approaches, and grow your career.

Role Responsibilities: This is a varied role that requires adaptability, ambition, and a proactive approach in a fast‑paced, agile environment. You will:

• Own delivery of data services: Take responsibility for the engineering and delivery of small‑to‑medium data services (or major components of larger platforms) across the full lifecycle, from design and build through to deployment, operation, and continual improvement.
• Lead on data architecture and design: Take ownership of the end‑to‑end design of data pipelines, data models, and platform components, producing and maintaining high‑quality technical documentation.
• Collaborate with Lead and Principal Engineers, Data Architects, and practitioners from disciplines such as UCD and Data Science to review and refine designs and translate them into robust implementations.
• Build and operate data pipelines: design, develop, test, and deploy ETL pipelines to source, cleanse, and optimise data at scale.
• Automate and orchestrate data workflows: Develop and maintain orchestration solutions (e.g. Apache Airflow), implementing testing, alerting, monitoring, and data quality checks as first‑class concerns.
• Ensure data quality and observability: Embed data testing and validation processes alongside monitoring and alerting systems such as Prometheus and Grafana to ensure reliability, performance, and operational insight across data services.
• Work with metadata and standards: Implement metadata capture and validation within data pipelines, including working with geospatial metadata standards where relevant, to support governance, discovery, and reuse.
• Support delivery planning: Partner with Delivery Managers to plan and structure technical activities, provide accurate and commercially sound estimates, and proactively identify and mitigate technical risks, issues, and dependencies.
• Build stakeholder trust: Act as a trusted technical advisor to client counterparts, partner organisations, and third parties, ensuring alignment between data requirements, business needs, and technical delivery.
• Mentor and develop others: Provide guidance and technical leadership to Data Engineers and adjacent roles, supporting professional growth and fostering a culture of high‑quality, sustainable delivery.

Essential Skills:

• 5+ years’ proven experience in a Data Engineering role, delivering production‑grade data platforms and pipelines.
• Strong Python skills, with experience using Python to build, test, and operate data pipelines and services.
• Proficiency with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP), delivering scalable, secure, and well‑architected data solutions.
• Strong experience working with core data stores, including relational databases such as PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL.
• Experience with non‑relational and NoSQL data stores (e.g. DynamoDB, MongoDB or equivalent) and understanding when to apply them.
• Hands‑on experience designing and operating event streaming platforms including Kafka and its core concepts on topics, messages, and consumers.
• Experience building and operating automated data workflows using tools like Apache Airflow.
• Experience implementing data quality and validation checks throughout pipelines to ensure accuracy, completeness, consistency, and reliability.
• Practical experience implementing monitoring, observability and alerting for data platforms using tools such as Prometheus and Grafana.
• Strong understanding of data architecture patterns, including data lakes, data warehouses, and event‑driven architectures.
• Awareness of GDPR and data protection practices, including secure handling of sensitive data and privacy‑by‑design principles.
• Experience working in Agile environments (Scrum, Kanban), contributing to delivery planning, estimation, and iterative improvement.
• Proven experience mentoring and supporting other engineers, enabling high‑quality delivery and team capability growth.
• Familiarity with metadata standards, including experience validating and implementing metadata, with exposure to geospatial metadata standards (e.g. ISO 19115, INSPIRE, GEMINI) being highly desirable.

Desirable Skills:

• Experience working in a consultancy environment, engaging with external stakeholders and clients.
• Exposure to public sector projects and delivering solutions in complex organisational landscapes.
• Experience working with geospatial or GIS data (e.g. spatial databases, geospatial data formats or services) is highly desirable, reflecting the nature of the work we deliver.
• Experience with Graph databases (e.g. Neo4j, Apache Jena) for modelling and querying complex relationships in data.

Key abilities that are necessary for success:

• Able to work effectively in environments where you can adapt to innovative practices involving uncertainty, change, and agile working.
• Ability to manage competing priorities and your time so you can deliver high‑quality work within deadlines.
• Good interpersonal skills, with the ability to respect and accept different perspectives and disagreement, work collaboratively in diverse teams, and maintain positive working relationships.
• Good judgement and decision‑making in complex environments where uncertainty, ambiguity, and risk must be collaboratively managed by working supportively alongside others.
• Good communication skills, including clear, constructive written outputs and measured, respectful verbal delivery.

We work in a fast‑paced, ever‑evolving innovation and problem‑solving workplace environment where no two days are the same. This requires you to have the foundations of personal resilience, professional adaptability, and flexibility in working alongside others with a positive mindset.

What You’ll Gain: At Informed Solutions, you’ll have the opportunity to make a tangible impact while advancing your career. You’ll gain:

• Ownership and influence: Lead the delivery of services, shape technical direction, and influence project outcomes at a senior level.
• Professional growth: Develop your leadership and mentoring skills, guiding colleagues and helping them thrive.
• Exposure to high‑profile projects: Work on enterprise‑scale digital solutions that improve public services and have societal impact.
• Technical development: Expand your expertise across a wide range of modern technologies, including cloud, microservices and serverless architectures.
• Collaborative, supportive environment: Join a team that values learning, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.
• Career progression: Opportunities to grow within a consultancy setting, broadening your client‑facing experience and technical leadership.

Our benefits package compliments our highly competitive salaries and our great working environment. We believe that our people should be properly rewarded for their commitment to the continued success of our business through a comprehensive and flexible range of benefits.

Culture: We are proud to nurture a workplace culture that is diverse, inclusive, rewarding, and egalitarian. We strive to live up to our values of Innovation, Excellence, and Integrity by thinking about things differently, always doing our best, and acting in good faith at all times.