Lead Data Engineer

Job summary

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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. You will also led these teams in capability and their technical and strategic direction

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 willing to acquire, SC clearance. Please review GOV.uk guidance , if candidates are unable to meet requirements of SC clearance, you maybe be rejected from the process.’

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.
• Expertise and experience in a technical area responsible for delivering outcomes to challenging timescales
• 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

Further Location Information

Please ensure that you only apply for a location that you are willing and able to work from, as we will only make one offer of employment. Any additional notes included in a ‘Further Location Preferences (optional)’ field within the application form, will not be considered. Please be aware that you cannot change your location preference after submitting your application.

Office closures

For more information on where you might be working, review this information on our locations.

If your location preference is for one of the following sites, it’s important to note that these are not long-term sites for HMRC and we will require you to move to a new building in the future, subject to our location strategy and the applicable employee policies at that time.

These sites are:

• Telford Plaza, Telford - moving to Parkside Court, Telford
• Trinity Bridge House, Salford - moving to an alternative office in Manchester/ Salford

You will be given more information about what this means at the job offer stage.

Leeds Locations

Moves Adjustment Payment will be available for this role, provided the successful applicant is a current HMRC colleague in Bradford and meets the eligibility requirements outlined in the HMRC’s Moves Adjustment Payment guidance.

Behaviours

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

• Leadership

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £58,541, HM Revenue and Customs contributes £16,959 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

HMRC operates both Flexible and Hybrid Working policies, allowing you to balance your work and personal commitments. We welcome applications from those who need to work a more flexible arrangement and will agree to requests where possible, considering our operational and customer service needs.

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.

To find out more about HMRC