Senior Data Engineer

Apply before 11:55 pm on Sunday 22nd March 2026

Location: Bristol, Coventry, Darlington, London, Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield

Salary: up to £up to £81,736

Job summary

At our heart, we are the department opportunity. We enable children and learners to thrive, by protecting the vulnerable and ensuring the delivery of excellent standards of education, training and care.

Data is integral to achieve this vision and the roles on offer are part of the Data Directorate within DfE. As a directorate, we provide a full range of data sourcing, management, governance, sharing, statistics, and visualisation capabilities and products to users across DfE, the education sector, cross-government, and citizens. We’re seeking highly capable Data Engineers to help us achieve our vision.

We’re striving to create a place that’s great to work in. We offer forward-thinking ways of working and training opportunities, as well as providing support from specialist colleagues. On top of that, you’ll find flexible working, an inclusive culture and a place where your skills can bring tangible change.

Job description

As a Senior Data Engineer, you will be joining a team of talented data engineering professionals, who are committed to delivering high-impact, secure data solutions to achieve departmental and directorate objectives.

You will:

• Work as part of a multidisciplinary team in a large and complex data environment to design, build, and deliver high performance, secure, scalable data solutions - adapting and embedding practices such as CI/CD and DevOps.
• Partner with the product owners, business analysts, architects, test engineers, and data analysts to understand data needs, and deliver on those needs.
• Lead and build complex data engineering solutions for data products.
• Work on Azure cloud-based tech stack, Databricks, Pyspark, Informatica DEI.
• Ensure the stability, robustness and resilience of the products you build, and be in a position to affect changes to those products where necessary.
• Coach and mentor junior members of the team to support their professional development.
• Help build and maintain our data engineering community to facilitate knowledge sharing, innovation, and collaboration across the department.

Person specification

Essential Criteria

We will assess you on the following criteria during the selection process, we are looking for strong experience of/expertise in:

• Designing, building, and performance tuning complex data pipelines and can manage all data engineering activities required to deliver a data product on any of the following cloud platforms – Azure, AWS, Google Cloud.
• Proficiency in two or more of the following – SQL, Python, Apache Spark (Pyspark, Spark SQL).
• Working with structured and unstructured data, data lakes, large data warehouses to service complex operational and analytical business needs.
• Implementing latest tools and technologies, including migrating to and implementing modern data architectures, such as lake houses, cloud data warehouses etc.
• Delivering through Agile/DevOps working practices in multi-disciplinary teams – CI/CD, Scrum, Automation.
• Managing and improving data quality issues including root-cause analysis and recommending/implementing data quality improvement strategies.

Desirable Criteria

• Databricks, Informatica DEI and Azure Data Factory.
• Developing complex data models.
• Developing machine learning solutions.

Desirable criteria will only be assessed in event of a tie break situation to make an informed decision.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Leadership

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £58,185, Department for Education contributes £16,856 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

Applicants currently holding a permanent post in the Civil Service should note that, if successful, their salary on appointment would be determined by the Department’s transfer / promotion policies.

As a member of the DfE, you will be entitled to join the highly competitive Civil Service Pension Scheme, which many experts agree is one of the most generous in the UK.

You will have 25 days leave, increasing by 1 day every year to a maximum of 30 days after five years’ service. In addition, all staff receive the King’s Birthday privilege holiday and 8 days’ bank and public holidays.

We offer flexible working arrangements, such as job sharing, term-time working, flexi-time and compressed hours.

Most DfE employees will be working a hybrid pattern, spending at least 60% of their time in an office or work setting. Changes to these working arrangements are available in exceptional circumstances but must be agreed with the line manager and in line with the requirements of the role.

Travel to your primary office location will not be paid for by DfE, but costs for travel to an office which is not your main location will be covered.

As an organisation, which exists to support education and lifelong learning, we offer our staff excellent professional development opportunities.

We are proud supporters of Women in Data. Connect, engage and belong to the largest free female data community in the UK – visit: www.womenindata.co.uk to join our community.

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