Data Engineer

Irish Life; Potters Bar; On-site; GBP 40,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job description

Canada Life UK looks after the retirement, investment and protection needs of individuals, families and companies. We help to build better futures for our customers, our intermediaries and our employees by operating as a modern, agile and welcoming organisation.

Part of our parent company Great-West Lifeco, Canada Life UK has operated in the United Kingdom since 1903. We have hundreds of respected and supported employees committed to doing the right thing for our customers and colleagues.

Canada Life UK is transforming to create a more customer-focused business by providing our customers with expertise on financial and tax planning, offering home finance and annuities propositions, and providing collective fund solutions to third party customers.

Job Purpose
The Data Engineer is a hands-on technical role responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining data pipelines within the IT department. The pipelines will be realised in a modern lake environment and the engineer will collaborate in cross-functional teams to gather requirements and develop the conceptual data models. This role plays a crucial part in driving data-driven decision-making across the organisation, ensuring data availability, quality, and accessibility for various business needs.

This is not a line management role, but you will play a key part in guiding and upskilling more junior data engineers and setting data standards and guidelines.

What you'll do

1. Data Pipeline Development
   
   • Design, model, develop and maintain data pipelines to ingest, store, process, and present data.
   • Ensure data quality, accuracy, and consistency.
   • Collaborate with data architects to ensure data pipelines align with the overall data architecture strategy.
2. Data Transformation and Integration
   
   • Perform data transformation tasks, including data cleansing, enrichment, and aggregation, to prepare data for analytics and reporting.
   • Integrate data from structured and unstructured sources, ensuring compatibility and alignment with data models and business requirements.
   • Automate data transformation processes to improve efficiency.
3. Data Quality Assurance
   
   • Implement and maintain data quality checks and validation processes to identify and resolve data anomalies and errors.
   • Monitor data pipelines for data quality issues and implement data quality improvements.
   • Collaborate with business stakeholders to define data quality requirements.
4. Data Modelling and Schema Design
   
   • Collaborate with data architects and data scientists to design and implement data models, schemas, and structures.
   • Ensure that data models support business reporting and analytics needs while optimizing query performance.
   • Maintain data dictionaries and metadata to document data structures and relationships.
5. Performance Optimization
   
   • Optimize data storage, retrieval, and query performance by implementing indexing, partitioning, and caching strategies.
   • Monitor data processing performance and address bottlenecks as they arise.
   • Stay updated with best practices in data processing performance tuning.
6. Documentation and Knowledge Sharing
   
   • Create and maintain documentation for data pipelines, data transformation processes, and data integration procedures.
   • Foster a culture of knowledge sharing within the data engineering team and across the organization.
7. Collaboration and Stakeholder Engagement
   
   • Collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams, data stakeholders, and business units to understand data requirements and deliver data solutions that meet business needs.
   • Communicate technical concepts and data solutions to non-technical stakeholders in a clear and understandable manner.

Knowledge/Skills/Experience

Essential

• Extensive experience in data engineering, including designing and developing data pipelines for retrieval / ingestion / presentation / semantics in an Azure environment.
• Strong ADF, DataBricks, SQL, Python, Power BI.
• Data acquisition from various data sources including Salesforce, API, XML, JSON, Parquet, flat file systems and relational data.
• Excellent team player able to work under pressure.
• Effective communication and collaboration skills to work with cross-functional teams and gather data requirements.
• Skills in data modelling (both structured and unstructured data) working directly with the business & data scientists.
• Ability to optimise data solutions for performance, scalability, and efficiency.
• Highly Desirable: Experience with Informatica ETL, Hyperion Reporting, and intermediate / advanced PL/SQL.

Desirable

• Experience in a financial corporation.
• Lake House / Delta Lake and Snowflake.
• Experience with Spark clusters, both elastic permanent and transitory clusters.
• Familiarity with data governance, data security, and compliance requirements.
• Power Automate.

Benefits of working at Canada Life

We believe in recognising and rewarding our people, so we offer a competitive salary and benefits package that’s regularly reviewed. As a Canada Life UK colleague, you’ll receive a competitive salary and comprehensive reward package including a generous pension and bonus scheme, along with income protection, private medical insurance and life assurance. We have a fantastic number of other benefits and support services as well as regular personal and professional development.

How we work at Canada Life

Our culture is unique and incredibly important to us. We care about doing the right thing for our people, customers and community and helping others to build better futures. Our blueprint behaviours shape and influence how we work, and are central to the relationships we have with others. Every day we are encouraged to be more curious, own the outcome, face into things together and find a way forward.

We want colleagues to have rewarding careers with us so we invest in the development of our people, technology and workplaces. That’s why we offer a range of training, flexible working and opportunities to grow and develop.

Diversity and inclusion

Building an inclusive workplace with a diverse workforce where everyone can feel they belong and achieve their potential regardless of gender, ethnicity or any other characteristic is a key commitment for us. We are proud of the progress we’re making in DEI, and we continue for it to be a significant focus.

“At Canada Life we believe in the power of great people from different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives coming together to build better futures. Emerging talent is crucial to our growth and creating an environment that continues to inspire us all.” Nick Harding, Chief People Officer, Canada Life UK

We appreciate that everyone has different work and life responsibilities. We’re happy to discuss flexible working arrangements, including part time, for any of our roles should this be a requirement for you.