Senior Data Engineer (GCP) - Office for National Statistics - SEO

Location

The locations for this role are Newport, Titchfield (Fareham) and London.

This role is aligned to ONS hybrid working principles, which are based on attending the office with purpose. The postholder will be expected to contribute to the organisation’s overall 40% office attendance, in line with business and role requirements.

Due to workforce controls you can only select Manchester / Darlington / Edinburgh / Belfast if you are an existing ONS employee contracted to that location. If you are not contracted at one of these sites, these options are not available to you.

Only existing ONS contractual homeworkers can select Homeworking.

Applicants who select a location they are not eligible for will be removed from the recruitment process and will not be considered for alternative locations. Please refer to attachments for further terms and flexibilities.

The induction process for the role will be conducted in person.

About the job

Job summary

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social and demographic topics. These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution, and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime, and migration.

Data Products, Services and Governance (DPSG), which sits centrally within ONS, provides a cross-ONS capability for data, including data access and preparation, and the provision of data and linked data products.

DPSG develops and manages the systems and processes that underpin the distribution of data across ONS and beyond. DPSG provides data to ONS, academia, wider government, and other external users in a safe and controlled way, supporting and encouraging users to maximise data utility, enabling innovation and statistical and research use.

Data Engineers are responsible for data products and services in ONS, primarily to support the ease-of-use and consistency of our data across our data platforms, enabling ONS statistical areas, researchers and wider external data users.

Curious about an exciting opportunity to develop your career as a Data Engineer?

Join us at one of our recruitment events in September on the 3rd and 10th at 12pm to learn more about the role, the profession, and the opportunities available. You'll hear from our current Data Engineers, who will share their experiences, career journeys, and insights into working within the profession. A recruitment representative will also be on hand to explain the recruitment process and answer any questions you may have.

Register now to secure your place and take the next step in your Data Engineering career. Book Here 03/09 or Book Here 10/09

Job description

We’re looking for someone with technical skills but also a great attitude, who is proactive, takes pride in the quality of their work and has an eagerness to develop their technical skills to the next level. We welcome applications from varied technical backgrounds including but not limited to: data science, infrastructure engineering, software engineering or related technical disciplines. 

Day to day, our focus is on building and operating cloud-native services and pipelines on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) platforms, using native GCP services such as BigQuery, Cloud Functions, Pub/Sub, and Apache Airflow to ingest, process, orchestrate, and deliver data at scale as needed to support the growing work of a changing organisation. Your work will include data cleansing, validation, and enhancement processes to refine the quality and integrity of the data and prepare it for onward linkage.

We encourage training and development so that we can stay on top of changing technology. We have and continue to invest in the development of our staff with internal and external training opportunities.

As a Senior Data Engineer in ONS you may:

• Work across the lifecycle of ETL/ELT (extract, transform, load / extract, load, transform) pipelines that facilitate the movement and transformation of data across our systems. 
• Conduct data profiling and analysis to assess data quality, identify anomalies, and uncover insights that inform data pipeline design and business decision-making.
• Develop and maintain internal software packages for Data Engineering.
• Use tools across our tech-stacks, such as Python, PySpark, Cloudera Data Platform, Google Cloud Platform.
• Optimise the performance of our queries and data pipelines.
• Collaborate with various technical and business stakeholders to develop and deliver on requirements, to ensure our data and processes meet business needs.
• Set, follow and ensure adherence to standard ways of working and good practice in Data Engineering.
• Ensure governance and compliance of our data and processes in line with ONS policies and wider legal requirements.
• Contribute to the evaluation and adoption of new tools, frameworks, and technologies that enhance the data engineering ecosystem.
• Champion the role of Data Engineers within ONS and participate in ONS and Civil Service Data Engineering communities.
• Take an active role in building the capability of Data Engineers within ONS

Responsibilities  

• Lead the design, build, operation and maintenance of a portfolio of repeatable pipelines to prepare and load data into strategic ONS data platforms. 
• Oversee the rollout of improvements to data engineering processes across a portfolio of repeatable pipelines. 
• Identify opportunities for innovation in our Data Engineering workflows and processes. Work as part of a team to deliver prioritised change projects to deliver efficiencies and improvements. 

Person specification

Essential Criteria:

• Programming and build (data engineering) - Practitioner - Use agreed standards and tools to design, code, test, correct and document moderate-to-complex programs and scripts from agreed specifications and subsequent iterations. Develop and review specifications where appropriate
• Communicating between the technical and non-technical - Working  - Communicate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders. Support and host discussions within a multidisciplinary team, with potentially difficult dynamics. Be an advocate for the team externally. Manage differing stakeholder perspectives  
• Problem management - Practitioner - Ensure that the right actions are taken to investigate, resolve and anticipate problems. Co-ordinate the team to investigate problems, implement solutions and take preventive measures.
• Experience and familiarity with using the Google Cloud Platform estate.