Job title: Data Engineer

Location(s): Central London or Greater Manchester Area

Salary: £55,107 - £57,495 London (dependent on skills and experience)

Salary: £55,448 Manchester

Flexible Working: We support full-time, part-time, compressed and flexible hours. We’re committed to offering remote working in our organisation, however, our ability to do so is dependent on role requirements and business need.

About Us

MI5 and MI6 are part of the UK’s Intelligence Services. We work together to safeguard Britain’s people, interests, and businesses from various threats at home, overseas and online, including cyber-attacks, espionage, terrorism, and organised crime. Working across our vital missions, you’ll deliver impact at the heart of national security, all within a supportive and inclusive environment that allows everyone to thrive.

The Role

Technology sits at the heart of everything we do, enabling us to disrupt serious threats to UK national security. We're looking for Data Engineers to take on a more senior role within multi-disciplinary product teams and provide technical direction and mentoring for less experienced colleagues, working alongside product owners, business analysts and agile delivery colleagues to build and run secure applications and products. You’ll play a vital role in a team that ensures MI5 and MI6 can stay ahead in an evolving digital world.

You’ll share collective responsibility to keep the country safe, keen to constantly improve yourself and your team. As part of a collaborative team, we actively encourage our engineers to learn about our mission and build relationships with people across teams, driving forward a joined-up approach by actively promoting knowledge sharing between team members, partners, and stakeholders.

This role brings plenty of opportunities and challenges every day and you’ll be expected to take ownership of large problems, breaking them down and working closely with the team to deliver new features through the whole engineering lifecycle. Along with supporting products owned by the team, you’ll provide an on-call professional service when necessary, working with users to identify and fix defects and automating tests to maintain the assurance of our continuous integration pipelines. This role is hands-on, with plenty of opportunities to support and mentor less experienced colleagues, helping them to understand what good data engineering looks like. With your experience of negotiating complexity and uncertainty in an Agile environment, you’ll have a good understanding of Agile working and will participate in agile ceremonies, guilds, and cross-organisation initiatives to help build our community of engineers.

We use agile methodologies to deliver products that are core to MI5 and MI6 operations, working to the full spectrum of investigative, analytical, and corporate areas of the organisation. We have opportunities to make use of modern approaches and cloud technologies such as AWS and Azure, and as part of our longer-term vision we are moving our DeveSecOps to use Cloud Native data technologies.

Our tech stacks vary between products (React.js, Commercial-off-the-shelf products, Oracle, MongoDB, Elastic Search and Hadoop), giving engineers access to a career where they can move between teams to build experience in a wide number of technologies or develop a deep specialism in their preferred area. We embrace a DevSecOps mindset, our teams automate, run and support what we build. Whether it’s building a platform to enable the analysis of data, systems to track the progress of our investigations, compliance services to ensure we are operating legally or tooling to improve our developer experience, the nature of our work presents unique and fascinating engineering challenges, the likes of which you’ll never have seen before.

About You

We’re looking for Data Engineers who have an understanding and can manage metadata across development teams and beyond with a practitioner level, working knowledge of data provenance and data lineage tools and methods. With your experience having worked with an extensive range of technologies and willingness to provide oversight and advice to other data engineers you’ll help deliver applications and products that protect the UK.

You’ll have a broad Data Engineering portfolio, showing a variety of techniques at different phases of an Engineering life cycle. You’ll also have experience leading a team and implementing new ways of working. A long-term thinker, you’ll take strategic ownership for the design and delivery of moderate to complex data flows utilising agile methodologies in collaboration with data architects, development teams, product owners and testers. You can apply data profiling principles to translate implement and deliver data models that adhere to industry standards including unstructured data, document formats, relational models, and formats to support geo-enabled applications and graph database structures.

You have a working knowledge of design patterns and can select and implement them appropriately. Using your knowledge and understanding of data engineering you can translate technical jargon into a customer friendly format and you’re comfortable communicating with lots of different audiences. You can constructively challenge the status quo, showing an understanding of how we work and how we can improve, always promoting best practise.

Training and Development

Learning and development is central to our engineering ethos, and we invest heavily in our staff. As part of your MI5 and MI6 career, we’ll support you in broadening and deepening your technical and non-technical skills. The Digital Data and Technology (DDaT) capability framework is our Data Engineering profession capability framework, we use it as a compass to provide guidance, tools, and support to enable you to progress your career further whether this is growing as a leader or an individual with deep technical knowledge and ability. We have access to a wide variety of classroom and online learning, as well as certifications and our own development programmes.

You’ll receive a starting salary of £55,107 - £57,495 for London and £55,498 for Manchester plus other benefits including:

• 25 Days Annual Leave automatically rising to 30 days after 5 years' service, and an additional 10.5 days public and privilege holidays (pro rata for part time).

• Opportunities to be recognised through our employee performance scheme.

• Personal Learning Budget.

• Interest-free season ticket loan

• Excellent pension scheme

• Cycle to work scheme.

• Facilities such as a subsidised gym and restaurant, and on-site coffee bars

• Paid parental and adoption leave.

Equal Opportunities

At MI5 and MI6 diversity and inclusion are critical to our mission. To protect the UK, we need a truly diverse workforce that reflects the society we serve. This includes diversity in every sense of the word: those with different backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, ways of thinking and those with disabilities or neurodivergent conditions. We therefore welcome and encourage applications from everyone, including those from groups that are under-represented in our workforce such as women, those from an ethnic minority background, people with disabilities and those from low socio-economic backgrounds.

Find out more about our culture, working environment and diversity on our website:

https://www.MI5.gov.uk/careers/diversity

https://www.MI6.gov.uk/explore-careers.html

Before You Apply

To work at MI5 and MI6, you need to be a British citizen or hold dual British nationality. You can read our full eligibility criteria here.

This role requires the highest security clearance, known as Developed Vetting (DV). It’s something everyone in the UK Intelligence Community undertakes. You can find out more about the vetting process here.

Please note we have a strict drugs policy, so once you start your application, you can’t take any recreational drugs and you’ll need to declare your previous drug usage at the relevant stage.

The role is based in Central London or Greater Manchester, so you’ll need to live within a commutable distance. Please consider any financial implications and practicalities before submitting an application. An interest-free loan via our benevolent fund is available to assist with relocating into privately rented accommodation to take up the offer of employment.

Please note, you should only launch your application from within the UK. If you are based overseas, you should wait until you visit the UK to launch an application. Applying from outside the UK will impact on our ability to progress your application.

We’re Disability Confident

MI5 and MI6 are proud to have achieved Leader status within the DWP’s Disability Confident scheme. This is aimed at encouraging employers to think differently about disability and take action to improve how they recruit, retain, and develop disabled people. Being Disability Confident, we aim to ensure that a fair and proportionate number of disabled applicants that meet the minimum criteria for this position will be offered an interview where practicable; this is known as ‘Offer of an Interview’. To secure an interview for this vacancy, the minimum criteria (in order of application process)

• Demonstrate a level of technical competence – assessed at Codility

• Demonstrate aptitude in skills that are required for the role – to be assessed at application sift.

What to Expect

Our recruitment process is fair, transparent, and based on merit. Here is a brief overview of each stage, in order:

• CODILITY.

• CV & CODILITY sift.

• Invited to technical and competency interview.

• Conditional offer of employment

• Vetting

• Formal offer of employment

Please note, you must successfully pass each stage of the process in order to progress to the next. Your application may take around 6 - 9 months to process including vetting, so we advise you continue any current employment until you have received your final job offer.

Right to Withdraw Statement:

Please be aware that we withhold the right to bring forward the closing date for this role from the original closing date once a certain number of applications have been received. Please be mindful of this and submit your application at your earliest convenience to avoid disappointment.

Data Engineer jobs

Data Engineer - MI5 & MI6