Junior Data Engineer

Sector: Energy, Infrastructure and storage. Our client is a dynamic powerhouse delivering grid-scale energy storage and power infrastructure across the UK. Backed by major infrastructure investors and scaling rapidly, our Client is recruiting for a Junior Data Engineer to join them on a permanent staff basis.

The Role

The Junior Data Engineer will join the team building the backbone of our Client’s data platform. This is a great first or early role for someone who wants to learn how real data systems are built and run. You'll start by helping get more data into our Client’s data warehouse, building API integrations with support, writing automated Python jobs, and helping our Client automate work currently done in Excel. As you grow, you'll take on more ownership of how our Client deploy, monitor and secure the platform.

This is a role with shaping-potential in a small team, where you'll learn alongside experienced engineers and see the impact of your work quickly. Our Client is looking for someone early in their career with strong fundamentals in Python and SQL and a genuine appetite to learn.

Key Responsibilities

• Data Pipelines and Integration
  • Help build Python jobs in Prefect (our Client’s Airflow equivalent) to pull data from APIs into the PostgreSQL data warehouse.
  • Work with APIs to get more data into the platform, learning to build integrations as you go.
  • Help ingest and process operational data from our Client’s engine and BESS sites, including time‑series and telemetry feeds, into the data warehouse.
  • Support reporting and automation for the control room by writing scripts, tidying data and building tools that save people hours.
  • Help make site, generation and market data available and reliable for teams that depend on it.
• Infrastructure and Platform
  • Help maintain and improve our Client’s infrastructure, including Linode servers (main platform), Azure workloads, our Client’s MQTT broker and its backup, and replication and backups across their data warehouses.
  • Support the MQTT messaging that carries data from site, helping keep feeds reliable and resilient.
  • Support the migration of our Client’s internal FastAPI site, which serves warehouse data as HTML to internal users, into a more mature internal web solution.
  • Learn and contribute to our move toward infrastructure‑as‑code (Terraform), no‑code/low‑code deployment workflows, and stronger CI/CD via GitHub.
  • Grow into owning chunks of the platform end‑to‑end as your experience develops.
• Data Quality and Reliability
  • Help monitor data pipelines and feeds, resolving issues so that data arriving from sites is timely, complete and accurate.
  • Help build checks and alerting that catch problems before the teams relying on the data do.
  • Document pipelines, integrations and infrastructure so the platform is maintainable as it grows.
• Security and Resilience
  • Help ensure backups actually work when tested.
  • Learn and adopt good cyber security practice in your workflows.
  • Support disaster recovery testing across the data platform.

Key Requirements

Essential Skills & Qualifications:

• Degree in a STEM subject, or equivalent practical experience.
• Working knowledge of Python, with evidence you've built things with it — coursework, personal projects, internships or similar.
• Understanding of SQL and relational database basics, including simple joins and queries.
• Some exposure to Git/GitHub, or a willingness to adopt it as part of your day‑to‑day workflow.
• A genuine appetite to learn, and curiosity about how data systems and infrastructure fit together.

Knowledge Required

The postholder should have a working knowledge of Python and an understanding of SQL and relational database basics, ideally demonstrated through study, projects or early experience. Some familiarity with Git and GitHub, and an awareness of how data moves through pipelines and into a database, is helpful. An interest in Linux servers, cloud and self‑hosted infrastructure (such as Azure and Linode), and tools like Prefect, Terraform and MQTT is welcome, but these can all be learned on the job.

Desirable experience and skills

• Any experience working with APIs (consuming or building).
• PostgreSQL specifically.
• Workflow orchestrators (Prefect, Airflow, Dagster).
• FastAPI or similar Python web frameworks (e.g. Django).
• Cloud exposure. Azure, AWS or Linode.
• Comfort on the Linux command line.
• Terraform or other infrastructure‑as‑code tooling.
• MQTT or any pub/sub messaging.
• Light ML exposure. Curiosity here is welcome.
• Any experience in cyber-security is highly desirable (VPNs, access management, backup testing).

Person Specification

The successful candidate will be an enthusiastic engineer at the start of their data career, with strong fundamentals and a genuine appetite to learn. They will enjoy being a generalist who is keen to get involved across data pipelines, web APIs, infrastructure and automation, and to work on a range of business problems rather than specialising too early. They will typically be early in their career, or be a recent graduate.

They’ll be comfortable asking questions, taking feedback and learning quickly in a small team where the work is varied and the impact is visible. Rather than waiting to be told exactly what to build, they’ll want to get stuck in, learn how things work, and grow into owning more over time.