At a Glance
- Tasks: Lead the engineering of data platforms that drive analytics and decision-making.
- Company: Join HM Revenue and Customs, a key player in UK digital transformation.
- Benefits: Enjoy flexible working, generous leave, and a strong pension scheme.
- Other info: Be part of an inclusive team with excellent career development opportunities.
- Why this job: Make a real impact on data services that support millions across the UK.
- Qualifications: Experience in data engineering and leadership in agile environments.
Discover a career in your hands at HMRC. Whether you're seeking purpose, growth, or a workplace that gives you a true sense of belonging, hear from some of our employees as they share their story about what it’s really like to work at HMRC.
HMRC is delivering one of the largest and most complex digital transformations in the UK public sector. We provide services to over 45 million individuals and 4.9 million businesses, underpinned by a modern, secure, and scalable data platform.
As a Lead Data Engineer in Data Platform Services (DPS), you will play a critical role in shaping and operating the data platforms that enable analytics, insight, and decision making across HMRC. You will lead engineering activity across large scale data services, ensuring they are reliable, secure, and fit for future demand.
We are committed to building an inclusive environment where everyone can thrive. We offer flexible working patterns and support career development through our Data Academy and Government Digital and Data profession pathways.
Job description
You will lead the engineering and operation of an area within HMRC’s strategic data analytics platforms, ensuring high availability and performance at national scale. Working across multiple product oriented delivery teams, you will provide technical leadership for data ingestion, transformation, and exploitation services. You will collaborate with engineers, analysts, architects, and business stakeholders to evolve platforms that support advanced analytics, reporting, and data science. This is a hands-on leadership role requiring strong technical expertise alongside the ability to lead teams of Data Engineers, influence stakeholders, and drive continuous improvement in a DevOps environment.
A requirement of this role is that candidates either have, or are willing to acquire, SC clearance.
Person specification
Key Responsibilities:
- Lead the operation, support, and continuous improvement of enterprise data platforms and services.
- Provide technical leadership across multiple delivery teams, supporting agile ways of working.
- Ensure appropriate security controls and data governance are embedded in platform services.
- Engage with internal users and stakeholders to improve self-service data capabilities.
- Work with suppliers and partners to design, build, and run data services at scale.
- Contribute to out-of-hours support and on-call rotas where required.
Essential Criteria:
- Strong experience delivering and operating data platforms at scale, including data ingestion, transformation, and modelling in complex environments.
- Technical expertise in data engineering approaches and technologies, including at least one of the following: distributed data platforms (e.g. Hadoop), relational or NoSQL databases, and data warehousing and data lake concepts.
- Experience building and maintaining data pipelines using ETL/ELT tooling, with a focus on performance, data quality, and reliability, incorporating virtualization.
- Front end user tooling such as reporting and dashboarding, advanced analytics, machine learning and A.I.
- AWS and Azure Cloud Native products e.g. Glue, Dataflow, Databricks.
- Demonstrable leadership experience, including leading engineers or technical teams and guiding delivery in an agile/DevOps environment.
- Ability to apply security, governance, and best practice engineering standards within data platforms.
- Strong stakeholder engagement skills, including supporting business users and translating technical concepts into business outcomes.
Desirable Criteria:
- A cloud (AWS/Azure) delivery background.
- Knowledge in the following: EMR, Lambda, S3, RDS, EC2, EBS, EFS, Neptune, VPC (network layer), APIs, Terraform, Cloudwatch, IAM, KMS.
Benefits:
- Alongside your salary, HM Revenue and Customs contributes towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme.
- HMRC operates both Flexible and Hybrid Working policies, allowing you to balance your work and personal commitments.
- We offer a generous leave allowance, starting at 25 days and increasing by a day for every year of qualifying service up to a maximum of 30 days.
- Pension - We make contributions to our colleagues’ Alpha pension equal to at least 28.97% of their salary.
- Family friendly policies.
- Personal support.
- Coaching and development.
For more information on where you might be working, review this information on our locations.
Lead Data Engineer employer: United Kingdom Government
At HM Revenue and Customs, we pride ourselves on being an exceptional employer that fosters a culture of inclusivity, collaboration, and continuous professional development. As a Senior Business Analyst, you will have the opportunity to lead transformative projects in a dynamic environment while benefiting from flexible working arrangements and a commitment to employee growth. With a focus on meaningful work and a supportive team atmosphere across various UK locations, HMRC is dedicated to helping you thrive in your career.
StudySmarter Expert Advice🤫
We think this is how you could land Lead Data Engineer
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Some tips for your application 🫡
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How to prepare for a job interview at United Kingdom Government
✨Brush Up on Your Coding Skills
For a full-time software engineering role, it's crucial that we stay sharp with our coding abilities. Expect technical questions that might involve solving problems on the spot or discussing algorithms. Practise on platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to get comfortable with the types of questions that often come up.
✨Know Your Tools and Frameworks
Make sure we’re well-acquainted with the tools and technologies listed in the job description. Familiarise ourselves with any specific frameworks or programming languages mentioned. If United Kingdom Government uses React or Node.js, for instance, be ready to discuss how we’ve used them in previous projects or coursework.
✨Showcase Your Projects
Bring along a portfolio that highlights our best work. This could be code samples, GitHub repositories, or any side projects we’ve built. Make sure we can talk through our thought process for each project, especially the challenges we faced and how we solved them—this shows our problem-solving skills in action.
✨Prepare for Behavioural Questions
While technical skills are key, full-time positions also require cultural fit. Be ready to discuss our previous experiences and how we handle teamwork, conflict, and deadlines. Brush up on the STAR method—Situation, Task, Action, Result—to clearly articulate our past experiences when discussing how we've contributed to a team.
