Senior Data Engineer - Platforms and Tooling in Croydon

You could be based at any of the following Home Office hub areas - Croydon, Liverpool, Salford, Sheffield. A Civil Service pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%.

As a Senior Data Engineer in the Platforms and Tooling team, you will maintain, manage and upgrade the Vantage management information (MI) platform with modern cloud technologies such as Microsoft Azure Synapse, SQL, Power BI and Microsoft Fabric.

You will be a key team member, responsible for supervising:

• Technical Administration.
• Analytics and MI platform upgrades, efficiency and innovation.
• Day-to-day issue management and resolution.
• Help to inform the Tooling and Data Strategies.

You will establish and detail key support processes which enable the Platforms and Tooling team to scale and automate their system maintenance and support activities, improving the service for our end users and developers. The management information (MI) Platforms and Tooling team will collaborate closely with colleagues in the Performance Reporting & Analysis Unit (PRAU) and Home Office Digital, and with teams elsewhere in the Department.

Your main day-to-day responsibilities will be:

• Designing, building and maintaining cloud platforms and tools to enable management information (MI) teams to work effectively.
• Working with engineering teams to ensure that MI platforms and tooling are integrated with other systems and that they are compliant with security and regulatory standards.
• Work with the 1st and 2nd line support teams to handle incidents that they pass to your team and proactively monitor common issues with a view to resolving the underlying cause.
• Document key platform and tooling configurations and procedures.
• Provide technical support and deliver training to help other engineers deploy high quality MI services.
• Develop monitoring and observability tools to agreed standards for both technical and non-technical stakeholders and consumers.
• Adhere to an ‘accessible by default’ approach in all delivery and documentation activities, working closely with colleagues to implement and enforce accessibility across Power BI reporting and supporting documentation.
• Supporting colleagues with the broader rollout and adoption of MS Power BI across the organisation.
• Work with the wider organisation to enable the ingestion of data into the Vantage platform from various sources, in a secure and cost-effective way.
• Supporting in the successful delivery of completed data loads for customers, Data Engineers and Data Scientists and assisting in the development of new data load programmes.
• Identifying areas for cost savings and/or greater efficiency.

Qualifications and skills

You’ll have a demonstrable passion for Data, with the following skills or some experience in:

• Automating repetitive tasks via programming or low/no-code automation tools.
• Working as part of a team delivering technical products to a varied user base.
• The delivery of projects in data analysis, solution design and end user reporting.
• Automation of tasks or development in Power Bi, Azure Automation, Azure Data Factory, Azure DevOps, or Microsoft Fabric.
• Leveraging modern open-source programming languages, such as Python to develop and deliver high-quality data development and engineering solutions.
• Effectively managing and communicating with non-technical and senior stakeholders about performance and analysis.
• Applying data development / engineering techniques such as continuous improvement/continuous development – both in theory and practice or a strong aptitude to learn.
• Identifying, diagnosing and resolving issues with consideration for their wider impact on other teams and customers.
• Effective line management is required for this role.