Data Platform Engineer in Newcastle upon Tyne

Job Description

Norton Rose Fulbright is a global law firm with more than 3,000 lawyers advising clients across locations in the United States, Europe, Canada, Latin America, Asia, Australia, Africa and the Middle East.

We provide a full scope of legal services to the world’s preeminent corporations and financial institutions.

Practice Group / Department

EMEA IT Applications

Job Description

Norton Rose Fulbright is a global law firm with more than 3,000 lawyers advising clients across locations in the United States, Europe, Canada, Latin America, Asia, Australia, Africa and the Middle East.

We provide a full scope of legal services to the world’s preeminent corporations and financial institutions.

Our vision is to be a world class business, profitable, ambitious, cooperative and considerate, supporting our clients and people through our global business principles of Quality, Unity and Integrity.

With over 7,000 employees worldwide, our culture is the thread that connects us.

Our strategy and culture are closed connected – defined by shared ambition, global collaboration and a one-team mindset.

We believe pioneering work happens when people are empowered to think beyond boundaries, explore new opportunities and grow through diverse experiences.

Alongside the right skills and experience, we are looking for people who are innovative, commercially minded, and motivated by the impact of the work they do – ready to share in our ambition and help shape what comes next.

Because while individuals can do well, together we achieve something extraordinary.

The Role

The Data Platform Engineer will ensure Norton Rose Fulbright’s enterprise data platform is a stable, secure and supportable IT service.

The platform is built on Azure Databricks, Microsoft Fabric and associated Azure services, supports the firm's strategic data capability across EMEA and EMEAPAC, and is governed through Terraform, Azure Dev Ops and a standardised deployment framework.

The role is hands‑on and service-focused.

It provides the operational foundation needed to keep the platform reliable, observable, governed and ready for controlled production use.

Its emphasis is on platform health, support processes, quality assurance, release readiness, incident response and continual service improvement.

The successful candidate will work closely with Architecture, Information Security, Service Delivery, Infrastructure, suppliers and consuming business teams to ensure platform changes are deployed safely through established CI/CD processes, supported by appropriate monitoring, operational controls, documentation and governance standards.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide L2/L3 operational support for Microsoft Fabric, Azure Databricks, and associated Azure services.
• Maintain platform health, availability, resilience, and supportability across the data platform estate.
• Perform routine platform administration, operational checks, and capacity and utilisation monitoring.
• Monitor platform performance, identify optimisation opportunities, and maintain cost awareness.
• Troubleshoot issues across platform, identity, networking, storage, security and integration layers.
• Manage incidents, problems, and service requests in line with established ITSM processes.
• Investigate and resolve operational issues, ensuring timely restoration of service.
• Support major incident response activities where platform services are impacted.
• Contribute to root cause analysis and implement actions to improve platform stability and reduce issue recurrence.
• Collaborate with internal teams, suppliers and stakeholders to deliver effective operational support.
• Support change, release, and environment management activities across the platform estate.
• Maintain release readiness checklists and operational acceptance criteria.
• Validate platform changes prior to production deployment to ensure supportability and risk controls are in place.
• Support the management of Development, Test and Production environments.
• Ensure configuration consistency across environments and platform services.
• Contribute to CI/CD, version control and release automation practices for platform assets.
• Promote operational excellence through continuous improvement, knowledge sharing and robust documentation.
• Quality, Monitoring and Governance

A key part of the role is to define and execute operational QA checks for platform changes, integrations and supplier-delivered components.

The engineer will verify that monitoring, alerting, logging, access controls, runbooks, escalation routes and support processes are in place before production release.

They will support service acceptance and transition activity, assessing readiness against availability, recoverability, supportability, security and control requirements.

The role will implement and maintain monitoring, alerting and observability across Fabric, Databricks and Azure services.

It will develop service health reporting, operational dashboards and exception monitoring, and maintain runbooks, known error records, support documentation and knowledge articles.

The engineer will contribute to service reviews, operational assurance and continual improvement.

The role will support governance, security and compliance by assisting with access control, role management, privileged access processes, audit evidence, metadata, lineage, auditability and policy enforcement.

It will work with Risk, Privacy, Information Security and Architecture to ensure platform operations remain aligned with NRF policies, approved architecture patterns and applicable control requirements.

• Key Skills And Experience
• Experience supporting cloud‑based data platforms in production or near‑production environments, ideally including Microsoft Fabric, Azure Databricks or both.
• Strong understanding of Azure services and operational dependencies, including workspaces, capacities, lakehouses, pipelines, clusters, jobs, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, One Lake, Key Vault, Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Entra ID, managed identities, secure networking and private endpoint architectures.
• Proven experience in IT Service Management (ITSM), including incident, problem, change, release and service request management.
• Experience working with Service Now or equivalent service management tools.
• Knowledge of production support models, escalation processes, service transition and knowledge management practices.
• Ability to create and maintain runbooks, operational procedures, technical documentation and support knowledge articles.
• Practical experience of quality assurance, release governance and operational readiness activities.
• Experience validating technical changes, defining operational acceptance criteria and managing Development, Test and Production environments.
• Understanding of test and deployment evidence reviews, rollback planning and identifying operational support gaps before go‑live.
• Experience with monitoring, logging, diagnostics, dashboards, Azure Dev Ops Git CI/CD tooling and automation.
• Working knowledge of scripting and infrastructure‑as‑code tools such as Power Shell, Python and Terraform.
• Understanding of data platform governance, security controls, data classification, retention policies, privacy requirements and audit processes within regulated environments.
• Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

To attract the best people, we strive to create a diverse and inclusive environment where everyone can bring their whole selves to work, have a sense of belonging and realize their full career potential.

Our new enabled work model allows our people to have more flexibility in the way they choose to work from both the office and a remote location, while continuing to deliver the highest standards of service.

We offer a range of family friendly and inclusive employment policies and provide access to programmes and services aimed at nurturing our people’s health and overall wellbeing.

Find more about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion here.

We are proud to be an equal opportunities employer and encourage applications from individuals who can complement our existing teams.

We strive to create an inclusive and accessible recruitment process for all candidates.

If you require any tailored adjustments or accommodations, please let us know here.

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