Principal Data Engineer - UK Hydrographic Office - G7

We are looking for a talented Principal Data Engineer to join our team here at our state of the art offices in Taunton, Somerset. 

Working as part of our data engineering team, as Principal Data Engineer, you will take on responsibility for all aspects of data engineering and works with your peers to ensure efficient and sustainable function of the team. This will include a mixture of stakeholder management, project prioritisation, providing technical guidelines, and the building and productionising of data services and providing appropriate solutions.

About us

The UK Hydrographic Office is a leading centre for hydrography, providing marine geospatial data to inform maritime decisions. We work with a wide range of data suppliers and partners to support safe and secure navigation of the seas and marine development around the UK and worldwide.

Our data engineers organise as generalists to encourage sharing of projects, knowledge, and technical skills. The team is open and collaborative, working in an agile way to deliver projects. Continuous learning is supported along with sustainable working and a healthy work life balance. We own and maintain a large codebase of cloud-deployed, serverless data pipelines written to a high standard of software engineering. 

Hybrid working

We recruit engineers from across the UKHO, while the contracted place of work is Taunton, we are pragmatic as to how often people attend the office. We encourage people who live beyond commutable distance to attend occasionally for team building, but again this is based on a pragmatic approach.

Additional Information:

Whilst we welcome applications from those seeking part time work, please note, for C2 grades, we expect a minimum of 80% of time over a minimum of four days.

Job description

On a day to day basis you will be responsible for but not limited to: 

• Working with stakeholders and delivery managers to deliver data services
• Working along with your peers to build and maintain effective data engineering capability
• Producing roadmap/architect data flows and contribute to engineering solutions
• Ensuring reliability and performance of data engineering pipelines
• Modelling and building data storage solutions for different types of data
• Leading with code quality and documentation
• Sharing technical expertise with members of the data engineering team
• Line management and mentoring of junior members of the team, helping prioritise their workload

Person specification

• Track record of successfully delivering multiple resilient and scalable data pipelines
• Experience working with stakeholders to understand requirements
• Capable of using cloud technologies such as AWS/Azure/GCP
• Excellent programming ability, ideally in Python, along with programming best practice
• Experience of tools/techniques such as SQL, database types, data formats, data modelling
• Demonstrable experience of pipeline logging, usage tracking and cost monitoring
• Previous experience of deploying analytical/machine learning tools for users
• Experience of leading a team or multiple projects and supporting team members in workload prioritisation and development

Behaviours

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

• Communicating and Influencing
• Working Together
• Developing Self and Others