Interim Data Engineer

Interim Data Engineer

Pay Rate: Up to £600 per day pay range subject to IR35 status

Location: London but working from home at present

As a Data Engineer, you are responsible for developing accurate, efficient data solutions which meet customer needs to agreed timescales. You ensure the stability, robustness and resilience of the products you design and build, and are in a position to effect changes to those products where necessary. As a Data Engineer you support continuous improvement of standards, providing technical guidance alongside other data engineering functions for customers. You will act as a valuable role in the Universal Credit Data Science function, using data and insights to support the Universal Credit programme’s main objectives, championing data-based decision making to improve outcomes for claimants

Summary of the Role and key responsibilities
Data plays a significant role in the overall Product Strategy and Vision for the UC LMA programme, which is formed of the following product strands:

• Switch on conditionality - Provide product support to enable operations to safely switch back on conditionality from July 1st .
• Segmentation - For who, and at what pace, protecting payment timelines. Help work coaches understand their caseload characteristics and needs to support labour market activation.
• Case-loading - How can we effectively support our work coaches’ to manage, understand, and prioritise their caseload.
• Outcomes and use of data - Use our evolving segmentation and caseload understanding to drive providing MI. Build data tools to support work-coaches manage workloads and understand successful or unsuccessful interventions for claimants.
• Finding, referring, recording and tracking to provision (Kickstarter

Technical Skills required
This appointment is expected to form an initial part of a longer term programme of work, therefore significant progress is expected to made against the following deliverables (on some cases dependent upon prioritisation of development effort):

• Translate business requirements to ensure they are clear and robust, and can be transformed into reusable production ready code and / or effective data models;
• Define version control mechanisms and strategies for the source code of products;
• Support Quality Assurance colleagues and Data Managers responsible for the day to day testing and live running of data products and services;
• Shape solutions in a fit for purpose way; following the agreed principles and contribute to the overall Data Engineer Development lifecycle;
• Perform data profiling and quality measurements;
• Designing and developing reusable metadata libraries;
• Owning the stability of new products designed, including the on-going robustness, resilience and stability of these products;
• Identifying, managing and resolving issues preventing the delivery or continuous development of products

Specific to Big Data Developer role:

• Responsible for delivering data processing pipelines in a cloud or on premise environment using distribute file store technology.
• Responsible for creating and maintaining data pipelines using data streaming or batch transfer technology
• Designing ELT processes, data loading strategy, data archiving, data reconciliation, data manipulation, data integration, error handling and error logging mechanisms.

Knowledge and Experience required:

• Proven experience of big data engineering techniques and concepts using the Hadoop Stack (Cloudera/EMR), including data ingestion, processing and storage using HDFS, Spark, Hive and Impala.
• Extensive, hands-on experience of large complex Data Engineering projects designing and developing ETL pipelines in a cloud or on premise environment
• Experience of design and implementation of data storage, including HDFS, S3, relational and NoSQL
• Experience of developing/utilising programming and query languages e.g. SQL, Java, Scala
• Monitoring performance and advising on any required infrastructure or changes.
• A good understanding of data management, governance and quality frameworks, and how these integrate with big data solutions

Other:
This is the nice to have but not essential criteria

• Strong stakeholder management skills and experience working with stakeholders across all grades and working with internal / external stakeholders to deliver results
• Confident written and verbal communicator with the ability to present complex ideas in a compelling way to senior technical and non-technical audiences
• Comfortable with Agile methodology and ability to manage diverse projects with changing user needs
• Security Clearance will be required for this role, therefore only candidates who have continuous UK-based residence over the last 5 years will be considered

Contract Length: 6 months