Trainee Data Engineer Apprenticeship in Manchester

Salary: £28,300

Assessment centre dates: June

Start date: Monday 7th September 2026

Who we are: interactive investor is an award‑winning investment platform that puts its customers in control of their financial future. We’ve been helping investors for nearly 30 years. We’re now the UK’s number one flat‑fee investment platform, with assets under administration approaching £75 billion and over 500,000 customers.

Purpose of the role: As a Trainee Data Engineer, you will support ii to operate, maintain, and continually improve the firm’s Data Platform. Working alongside experienced Data Engineers, you will help ingest, transform, and model datasets such as customer, transaction, marketing, web analytics, and market data into a trusted source for analytics and Data Science/ML/AI.

Key responsibilities/what you’ll do:

• Support the daily Data Platform run under guidance, including checking scheduled jobs, investigating first‑line failures using runbooks, and escalating issues appropriately.
• Contribute to developing and maintaining ELT/ETL pipelines using Dagster, following established patterns for dependency management, retries, and alerting.
• Support the build and maintenance of warehouse structures under guidance.
• Draft, test, and document reusable SQL queries and data extracts for Data Analysts and business users.
• Support triage and delivery of Data Request tickets for ad‑hoc data needs.
• Help maintain data documentation, keeping definitions clear, consistent, and up‑to‑date.
• Support integrations for data pipelines with business systems and APIs.
• Run and extend data quality checks and basic observability.
• Learn performance and cost best practices in Snowflake.
• Work to strong DataOps practices.
• Follow privacy, security, and governance requirements.
• As required, support simple operational MI or ad‑hoc outputs via Streamlit and, occasionally, Power BI.
• Complete agreed training and/or required learning modules as part of the programme.

About the apprenticeship: As a Trainee Data Engineer, you’ll develop the technical knowledge plus the professional skills and behaviours to work within our exciting and fast‑paced Data and Innovation team, gaining valuable work experience plus achieving a qualification through a structured apprenticeship programme to kick‑start your career.

To apply for this role, you will need:

• To be at least 18 years old as of 1st September 2026.
• Be a UK/EEA citizen or have lived in the UK/EEA continuously for the last 3 years.
• To be eligible to work in the UK and not in full‑time education.
• To have achieved, or predicted to achieve in 2026, a level 3 qualification, such as A‑levels or equivalent.
• You must not hold an existing qualification at the same or higher level in a similar subject.
• An understanding of SQL, Python, core database concepts, and data modelling is desirable.
• A level 4 qualification in Data or Computer Science is desirable.

Benefits:

• Group Personal Pension Plan.
• Life Assurance and Group Income Protection.
• Private Medical Insurance – provided by Bupa.
• Staff discounts on our investment products.
• Personal & well‑being fund – supporting your physical and mental wellness.
• Retail discounts – savings at a wide range of high street and online retailers.
• Voluntary flexible benefits – tailor your benefits to suit your lifestyle.

interactive investor operates in accordance with the UK Equality Act 2010. We welcome applications from individuals of all ages, disabilities, gender identities, marital status, pregnancy/maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation.