Senior Data Engineer, N and I Business Operations

Home Office Digital designs, builds and develops services for the rest of the department and for government. Every year our systems support up to 3 million visa applications, checks on 100 million border crossings, up to 8 million passport applications and deliver 140 million police checks on people, vehicles and property.

Senior Data Engineers design and implement complex data flows to connect operational systems with analytics and BI systems. Youll build and manage data flows, collaborating with the Data Science community and Product Owners to identify strategies and services to best support business needs. Youll help set the direction for service technology and data architecture, while mentoring junior team members, promoting collaboration and encouraging an agile approach to work.

Youll get to work with some of the largest and most varied datasets around, and benefit from a wealth of continuous professional development resources and career opportunities. Youll play a key role in delivering joined-up, intelligent services that unlock the value from data and deliver better outcomes for the UK.

Where business needs allow, some roles may be suitable for a combination of office and home-based working. Where this is the case, employees will be expected to spend a minimum of 60% of their working time in the office. Applicants can raise any queries to the email address at the bottom of the advert.  

Watch this short video to hear from members of Home Office Digital talking about the projects they work on and their experience of working here: Working for Home Office Digital.

This role sits in the Central FinOps team and is primarily focused on cloud financial management. We are looking for an experienced finance professional who wants to apply their knowledge in a digital and data-enabled environment. Strong finance experience is the primary requirement. Previous data engineering, cloud or programming experience is not essential, as the relevant technical skills can be developed in the role.

You will support the financial management and control of significant AWS and Azure expenditure. This includes cost allocation, budgeting and forecasting, invoicing, reconciliation, recharge and chargeback. You will investigate financial discrepancies and work with finance, commercial, supplier, cloud platform and business teams to ensure expenditure is accurate, traceable and attributed to the correct portfolios, programmes and services.

Using financial and cloud consumption data, you will help improve management information, reporting, dashboards and automated financial processes. Your work will strengthen financial governance, transparency and accountability while helping stakeholders understand their cloud consumption and associated costs.

This is an opportunity to move from a finance-focused career into FinOps, cloud financial management, data analytics and automation, while continuing to apply established experience of financial operations, accounting processes, governance and controls.

Senior Data Engineers design and lead the implementation of complex data flows to connect operational systems, data for analytics and BI systems.

As a Senior Data Engineer, you will identify, build, modify and manage data flows between complex systems using the appropriate solution.

You will be working with the Data Science community, who set the scope of data engineering work through user research and data pipelines. Through sharing work with Product Owners, you will identify strategies for how the service is best able to support business needs.

You will work with fellow members of the Data Engineering community to set the direction of the service technology and data architecture. You will also mentor more junior members of the team - promoting challenge, collaborating and encouraging an agile approach to working.

Main Responsibilities

• Analysing problems and experimenting with possible solutions to find the underlying causes of issues or discrepancies to identify problems and to assist in the development of innovative solutions.
• Analysing and reporting test activities and results, supporting data engineers and stakeholders on data analysis issues.
• Designing and implementing a data streaming service, including the development of new data models and ETL processes.
• Ensuring the successful delivery of completed data loads for customers, Data Analysts and Data Scientists, troubleshooting where required.
• Designing, building and testing data products and solutions that are complex or large scale, through full development, test and deployment lifecycles.
• Applying concepts and principles of data modelling and producing relevant and varied data models across multiple subject areas and providing guidance on how to use them.

Working Pattern

Due to the business requirements of this role, it is only available on a full-time basis. However, compressed hours are available.

Essential Skills

Youll have strong finance operations experience and an interest in using data, technology, and automation to improve financial processes; with the following skills or some experience in:

• Experience of financial operations within UK government or another large, regulated organisation, including financial accounting, management accounting, financial control, delegated authority, audit requirements and the accurate processing of financial transactions.
• Experience of budgeting, forecasting, cost allocation, reconciliation and investigating financial discrepancies, with strong attention to detail and a clear understanding of financial governance, risk management and internal controls.
• Practical experience of invoicing, receipting, purchase orders and credit notes, including purchase-to-pay (P2P), order-to-cash (O2C), accounts payable or accounts receivable processes.
• Experience of using finance systems or enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, such as Oracle, to support financial processing, reporting or reconciliation.
• Experience of working with suppliers, commercial teams and operational stakeholders, including communicating complex financial information clearly to financial and non-financial audiences.
• Experience of using financial data, spreadsheets, reporting tools or management information to support analysis, assurance and decision-making.
• An interest in developing technical skills in: IT programming and automation, using tools such as industry standard ETL tools, network databases and scheduling and orchestration tools, using modern / open source programming languages in order to deliver data development / engineering products, using public cloud data technologies.

SFIA capability framework 

Skills for the Information Age (SFIA) version 8 is the technical framework that sets the standard capability and development of all levels in the Home Office. This is a link to the capability framework:  All skills A - Z English (sfia-online.org).

We use set SFIA technical skills to form our interview questions and we will assess you against these technical skills during the selection process.

The essential skills listed above are reflective of the Home Office Government Digital and Data Profession Career Framework (based on the industry standard SFIA framework). Use the SFIA Levels of responsibilityto understand what would be expected for each technical skills listed below.