Senior Data Engineer

Department: Technology

Location: Home based, UK (with occasional travel to London office)

Reports to: Head of Engineering

Hours: 37.5 per week

Salary: (Depending on experience) 

Role Overview 

We are looking for a Senior Data Engineer to join our Tech Team and take joint ownership of our data infrastructure and shape the direction of our data landscape: how it is governed, how it is structured, and how the business uses it. That last part matters as much as the infrastructure itself.

You will work closely with our product engineers on the decisions that affect the application database, and directly with business stakeholders to make sure the data we expose is the right data: not just the most convenient. This is a hands-on role, with senior judgment: knowing when to fix, when to redesign, and when to push back.

Key responsibilities:

• Own the data estate. Our stack is Postgres, GCP, BigQuery, and Looker. You keep things running reliably today, but you are also the person who decides and drives any changes needed to our architecture.
• Set the standard for how we work with data. You will establish the patterns, conventions, and governance practices that others build on. That includes how data is classified, how access is controlled, and how requests from the business are evaluated. Our policies are in place, and we need to implement them.
• Work with product engineers as a peer. Schema decisions in the application database have downstream consequences for everything else. You engage with those conversations early, have opinions about what belongs where, and help build data quality into the source.
• Change how the business thinks about data. When someone says "I want to see this dataset," your job is not to grant or refuse the request. It is to understand what they are actually trying to solve and find the right path to insight. Over time, you shift the culture: fewer "just add a field" requests, more conversations that start with the business problem.
• Hold the line on data governance. Cambridge Spark handles sensitive learner and employer data in a regulated environment. You treat compliant data handling as a point of professional pride, enforce least-privilege access as a matter of course, and push back constructively when a proposed approach would expose more than it should.
• Balance the immediate and the strategic. You can triage what is urgent, make pragmatic fixes, and still keep the longer-term design coherent. Neither horizon gets sacrificed for the other.

Candidate Specification: 

Essential

• Technical Experience:
  • Postgres : Schema design, query optimisation, indexing, and migrations in production.
  • GCP : hands-on experience with core services: Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, IAM, networking.
  • BigQuery : data warehousing and mirroring pipelines; cost management and performance tuning.
  • Looker or equivalent BI tooling : able to own a dashboard estate end-to-end, including coaching others to use it well.
  • Data modelling : strong instinct for when to aggregate, when to denormalise, and when not to expose raw data.
  • Data governance : classification frameworks, access controls, audit logging, data lineage; in practice, not just in theory .
• Judgment, not just experience. You know when the right answer is "fix the pipeline" and when it is "the pipeline is fine, the data model is wrong." You push back on the path of least resistance when it matters.
• A product-led style. You’re not purely analytics or BI, but close enough to software engineers to understand how application decisions affect data quality downstream, and confident enough to influence those decisions.
• Working directly with business stakeholders . You help people with questions get to better ones.
• Principled attitude to sensitive data . You will say "we should not be exposing this" when it’s right, and you hold that line while still being constructive and helpful to the business.
• Ownership without prompting . When something is wrong, you notice, understand what it means, and do something about it. You leave things better than you found them.

Desirable

• Familiarity with UK GDPR and DPA 2018, particularly in a regulated or learner-facing context
• Experience with dbt, Airflow, or comparable pipeline tooling
• Experience designing a data contract between an application engineering team and an analytics layer
• Background in EdTech or another regulated sector

What This Role Is Not

• A pure analytics or BI role. Looker is part of the picture, but the core remit is the data estate and governance layer beneath it.
• A hands-off architecture role. The seniority here is about better decisions, not less implementation. You will be in the code and the schemas.
• A role for someone who sees compliance as someone else's problem. The regulated nature of what we do means data governance is a first-class concern from day one.

Company Benefits : 

• Pension with 4% matched contributions, opportunity to opt into salary sacrifice scheme
• 25 days holiday + Flexi bank holidays + 1 day off on your birthday
• A day for volunteering
• Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave 
• Health & Wellbeing allowance of up to £30 per month
• Annual Summer and Xmas events
• Company socials including everything from Cambridge College formals, pub nights to team building events
• CPD Allowance alongside quarterly reflections to ring fence time for development and growth
• Private medical insurance and cash plan
• Holiday buy back scheme (up to 10 days p/a)
• Employee Assistance Programme with a dedicated company counsellor

Background to our Organisation

We are an education technology company that enables corporate and government organisations to achieve their business goals by educating their workforce with critical digital transformation skills to succeed in the AI era.

We deliver unique and innovative professional education that is accelerating the digital transformation of our clients, advancing the careers of their employees, helping people get into work and closing the digital skills gap. We are in a sector that is crucial to the economy and workforce, with a lot of opportunity for change and innovation. We are at the cutting edge of teaching applied data and digital skills, with our unique patented learning platform EDUKATE.AI offering our clients and learners a unique learning experience. EDUKATE.AI was developed with support from Innovate UK and provides all of our learners with 24/7 immediate feedback on their work, helping accelerate the learning process and providing a sandbox environment to experiment on real world datasets.

Since 2016, we have supported more than 15,000 learners across four continents with nearly 550,000 pieces of code submitted for feedback on EDUKATE.AI. We are trusted by some of the most recognisable brands in the world to educate their workforce, including Microsoft, the NHS, GSK, easyJet, the BBC and John Lewis. Our focus on applied learning to create business impact sets us apart - individual learners have reported applying their skills at work to generate recorded value of up to £40m. 

Our Values

At the centre of the way we work together and inspire each other to achieve success are these core values:

Entrepreneurial

We take initiative and show entrepreneurial spirit which fuels innovation at Cambridge Spark. This includes identifying opportunities for improvement, taking ownership for implementing solutions effectively and driving improvement by using proof of concepts to demonstrate the feasibility and value of their work.

Team Spirit

Everyone is part of building an open and transparent culture, communicating effectively to raise issues, discuss improvements and share the evidence used to make decisions.

Customer-focused

Our customers are at the centre of everything we do, inspiring us to create great work. We strive to build friendly, professional and lasting relationships with them to better understand and anticipate their needs.

Gold Standard

We are experts in our field and are constantly developing our technology and offering. We set the benchmark in our industry: both in what we offer customers and in how we deliver it.

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Cambridge Spark is an Equal Opportunities Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind.  Cambridge Spark is committed to the principle of equal employment opportunities for all employees and to providing employees with a work environment free of discrimination and harassment. All employment decisions at Cambridge Spark are based on business needs, job requirements and individual qualifications, without regard to race, colour or ethnicity, ability or disability, gender or gender reassignment, sexual orientation, marital status, religion, age or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. Cambridge Spark will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on any of these characteristics. Cambridge Spark encourages applicants of all ages.