Senior Data Engineer

We’re First Central Insurance & Technology Group (First Central for short), an innovative, market-leading insurance company. We protect the things customers love so they can get on with what matters to them in life. 

Data drives us. It fuels our outstanding distribution, finance, technology and legal services. Our underwriting skills are built on data expertise; it creates the insights we need to give the right cover to the right customers at the right price. But, it’s the people inside and outside our business that power us. They make us stand out, help us succeed. We’re ambitious. We’re growing. We’ve won awards.   

Are you ready to embark on a thrilling new career in a fast-paced and dynamic workplace? If so, today might just be your lucky day! We’re on the hunt for 2 passionate and skilled Senior Data Engineers to become key players in our cutting-edge technology and data teams.

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.  

Could you fit the bill? We're big on working flexibly - you'll spend most of your time working from home, with the occasional visit to the office, but of course, it’s your choice - if you prefer to be in the office more - that's good with us too.  We've offices located in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, Salford Quays, Manchester, and Guernsey it’s your choice - or maybe you live further afield, we’ll accept applications for remote workers! 

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

• Data & Technology: You have a passion for all things data, analytics, and technology with experience of working with metadata driven pipelines
• Self-starter: You can triage workloads and act autonomously to achieve goals.
• Mentorship: You thrive as a role model, mentoring and inspiring your data colleagues.
• Data Lifecycle: You understand the importance of the data lifecycle and can demonstrate upfront design while following standard processes.
• Cloud Data Engineering: You have extensive experience in data engineering within cloud data platforms.

Making it happen. Together

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.
• 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 PowerBI.

Experience & knowledge

• Requires 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.