Senior Data Engineer

Location: Leeds

Closing Date: 18th November 2026

Interviews: Interviews will take place in person in Leeds on 1st and 2nd December 2026

Grade: SEO

(MoJ candidates who are on a specialist grade, will be able to retain this grade on lateral transfer)

Salary**: £42,914 - £46,182 (which may include an allowance of up to £9,424)

Working pattern: Full-time, Part-time, Flexible working

Contract Type: Permanent

Number of vacancies: 1

Vacancy number: 23703

*We offer a hybrid working model, allowing for a balance between remote work and time spent in your local office. Office locations can be found ON THIS MAP

Please note that unless you are an existing member of staff at Justice Digital, Data and Science, the only London location being recruited to is 10 South Colonnade, E14 4PU. We are no longer recruiting to 102 Petty France, SW1H 9AJ.

Please note this role requires you to pass Security Check clearance. Please click on the link for details.

We’re recruiting for a Senior Data Engineer here at Justice Digital, Data and Science to be part of our warm and collaborative property team.

This role aligns against Senior Data Engineer from the Government Digital and Data Framework

This is a great opportunity to work with leading cloud technology and help change the way data is used in the public sector. Data engineers at MoJ play a critical role in our mission to put data at the heart of decision-making. We're looking for people with the drive to develop a deep understanding of data needs and data availability across specific areas of the Ministry of Justice.   

You will work with other Data Engineers, and alongside Analytics Engineers, to bridge the gap between data producers and data users, exploring cutting edge GenAI/AI tooling, developing analytical pipelines and self-service tools to acquire and transform data, making it available on our Analytical Platform.

The Property domain works with a wide range of structured and unstructured data, including documents and text-based records. As part of ongoing development of the Data and Analytics Engineering capability, we are exploring how emerging technologies, including GenAI, can support the processing and structuring of this data at scale. This includes example use cases such as document enrichment and classification to improve data accessibility for stakeholders.

You’ll receive a range of excellent benefits when you join our department, including:

• A generous employer pension contribution of 28.97% through the Civil Service Pension Scheme.
• 25 days of annual leave, (increasing to 30 days once you have reached 5 years of service), plus 8 bank holidays and a privilege day for the King’s birthday.
• Flexible working arrangements including hybrid working, working part time or compressed hours. Designed to support a positive work–life balance.

• Employees are allocated 10% of their working time for personal and professional development.
• A £1k per person learning budget is in place to support all our people, with access to best-in-class conferences and seminars, accreditation with professional bodies, fully funded vocational programmes and e-learning platforms.
• Compassionate maternity, adoption, and shared parental leave policies, with up to 26 weeks leave at full pay, 13 weeks with partial pay, and 13 weeks further leave. And maternity support/paternity leave at full pay for 2 weeks, too!

You can find more details of the Benefits we offer here. To help picture your life at MoJ Justice Digital, Data and Science please take a look at our blog.

• Designing and building robust, scalable, automated and generic data engineer tooling to improve ramp-up time for new pipelines, primarily using Python. 

• Designing, writing and maintaining ETL (extract, transform, load) scripts and code to ensure the ETL process performs optimally. 

• Designing and building data pipelines that integrate ML and GenAI capabilities (e.g. batch inference, text processing, or enrichment workflows), and evaluating their performance, cost and reliability in production settings.

• Using a range of AWS services to deploy your solutions in a reproducible, sustainable manner, with the core ones being: S3, Glue, Athena, Lambda and LakeFormation. 

• Using infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) to deploy pipelines as AWS cloud infrastructure. 

• Working with a range of structured and unstructured data, including text-based data, to support analytical and data science use cases.

• Using GitHub Actions to automate repository events.

• Both ensuring and contributing to standards around engineering.

• Developing and optimising code, tools and services that enable people to use data effectively, such as cataloguing and metadata.

You may also be expected to carry out the following day to day activities: 

• Designing and maintaining technical documentation. 

• Creating and promoting best practices within the team and wider. 

• Responding to incident reports, ensuring relevant prioritisation and detail to allow for effective investigation. 

• Developing novel solutions to fit the needs of a range of stakeholders. 

• Initiating team building and development initiatives. 

• Line managing a more junior colleague.

If this feels like an exciting challenge, something you are enthusiastic about, and want to join our team please read on and apply!

Essential

• Working in a technical team, preferably one that uses Python and SQL, as well as strong technical skills in these languages.
• Understanding of the software development lifecycle, including testing (e.g. pytest), version control (e.g. git) and CI/CD (e.g. GitHub Actions).
• Experience of working with a range of data sources, including data wrangling, analysis and manipulation.
• Communicating with stakeholders, and translating user needs into technical requirements

Willingness to be