Senior Data Engineer

We're 1st Central, a market-leading insurance company utilising smart data and technology at pace. Rapid growth has been based on giving our 1.4 million customers exactly what they want: great value insurance with an excellent service. And that's the same for our colleagues too; we won Insurance Employer of the Year at the British Insurance Awards 2024 and our Glassdoor score is pretty mega too

Are you ready to make a real impact in a fast-paced, innovative environment? This is your opportunity to step into a pivotal role where your expertise will shape the future of cutting-edge platforms and products.

We're on the lookout for a Senior Data Engineer who's not only passionate about data but thrives on solving complex challenges, driving innovation, and collaborating with forward-thinking technology teams. If you're eager to push boundaries, influence strategy, and help build the next generation of data solutions, we want you on board.

In this hands-on technical role, you'll be responsible for building technical data solutions for various projects and persistent data products. You'll design and implement complex data pipelines and manage database population, ensuring the data solutions align with the technical design and overall data platform patterns.  Whilst the role does not include direct people management responsibilities, you'll provide invaluable support, coaching and mentoring to data engineers and associate engineers, helping them develop and grow their skills.  

This is a flexible hybrid role, with occasional visits to our offices in Salford Quays (Manchester) or Haywards Heath (West Sussex) when required. For those based further afield, we also welcome applications from remote UK‑based workers. We offer excellent flexibility in working patterns and a company‑wide culture you can be proud to be part of.

We're seeking candidates with strong PySpark, Python and SQL expertise, if that sounds like you, apply today to explore this exciting opportunity.

Core skills we're looking for to succeed in the role:  

• Data & Technology: You'll have a deep passion for data, analytics and technology, along with proven experience in designing and managing metadata-driven pipelines.
• Cloud Data Engineering: You'll bring deep expertise in data engineering across modern cloud platforms, delivering scalable and robust solutions. With strong skills in Azure services — including Data Factory, Azure Functions, ADLS Gen2, Key Vault, Synapse Dedicated SQL Pool, and Azure SQL. 
• Programming Expertise: Proficiency in programming languages such as Python, PySpark, C#, and PowerShell will set you apart.
• Self-Starter: You proactively manage workloads, make informed decisions, and work independently to deliver results.
• Mentorship: You'll lead by example, mentoring and inspiring fellow data professionals to grow and succeed.
• Data Lifecycle Expertise: You'll appreciate the full data lifecycle and can demonstrate thoughtful upfront design while adhering to established standards and best practices.

What's involved:

• You'll be responsible for contributing to the low-level design of data solutions, taking high level solution architecture artefacts and translating them into workable designs and work packages.
• You'll be responsible for assuring the quality of data pipelines and database solutions built by data engineers, and their alignment to solution designs, patterns, and standards.
• You'll contribute to coding standards and design patterns for data engineers to follow, ensuring safe, high quality, compliant code.
• You'll develop high complexity, secure, governed, high quality, efficient data pipelines from a variety of on and off premise, internal and external data sources.
• You'll ensure that data is cleansed, mapped, transformed, and optimised for storage to meet requirements for business and technical use cases.
• You'll build data observability and data quality by design into all Data pipelines, promoting self-testing pipelines that proactively identify processing issues or discrepancies.
• You'll build solutions that pipe transform data into data lake storage areas, physical database models and reporting structures across data lake, data warehouse, business intelligence systems and analytics applications.
• You'll build physical data models that are appropriately designed to meet business needs and optimise storage requirements, ensuring maximum re-use.
• You'll carry out unit testing of own code, peer reviewing of others code to ensure appropriate quality, and be responsible for ensuring completeness of testing for data solution deliverables.
• You'll maintain effective, and appropriate documentation that brings transparency and understandability to pipelines created and code created.
• You'll coach and mentor Data Engineers & Associate Data Engineers.
• You'll create high complexity BI solutions including data marts, semantic layer, and on occasion reporting & visualisation solutions in recognised BI tools such as Power Bi.

Experience & knowledge

• Extensive experience of developing and implementing end-to-end data solutions in the cloud preferably in Azure.
• Experience engineering with big data technologies such as Databricks and/or Synapse Analytics, using PySpark.
• Solution design experience across end-to-end data solutions (sourcing to consumption)
• Experience in Azure services such as Data Factory, Azure Functions, ADLS Gen2, Key Vault, Synapse Dedicated SQL pool and Azure SQL.
• Experience using programming languages such as Python, C# and PowerShell.
• Understanding of infrastructure as code.
• Experience using data modelling techniques through design and build.
• Experience producing technical and operational support documentation.
• Experience of testing techniques and tools.
• Proven to be an excellent communicator with a natural ability to build rapport with others.
• Keen and active interest in the use of data, with active external networks.
• Drives businesses to extract value from data.
• Extensive experience of the full data lifecycle.
• Will have been involved in the implementation of Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) methods.
• Experience of working in an agile environment and self-managing teams, and comfortable stepping forward to lead sprint teams.
• Good coach who enjoys helping others grow and develop.

Skills & Qualifications

• An excellent creative problem solver who can deal with many different priorities at any one time.
• Able to turn an ambiguous business challenge into well-formed data solutions.
• Proactive and optimistic about what can be achieved and has an infectious positivity.
• Excellent time management and organisation skills with the ability to prioritise multiple demands and manage stakeholder expectations effectively.
• Supporting and enthusiastic team player, who others follow, focussed on delivering shared outcomes.
• Enjoys advising and supporting less experienced engineers.
• Able to follow, deliver changes to improve, standards and designs, ensuring their own work, and work of others, is of high quality.

This is just the be beginning.  Imagine where you could end up The journey's yours to shape

What can we do for you?

People first. Always. We're passionate about our colleagues and know the best people deserve an extraordinary working environment. We owe it to them so that's what we offer. Our workplaces are energetic, inspirational, supportive. To get a taste of the advantages you'll enjoy, take a look at all our perks in full here. 

Intrigued? Our Talent team can tell you everything you need to know about what we want and what we're offering, so feel free to get in touch.