Data Engineer London, England
Job description
About Us
We are MI5, we protect the UK from threats to national security such as terrorism and espionage. We gather intelligence and work closely with the police and law enforcement to detect threats and work out ways to stop them.
The Role
Technology sits at the heart of everything we do at MI5, enabling us to disrupt serious threats to UK national security. We’re looking for Data Engineers who are prepared to take on a more senior role within multi-disciplinary product teams. You’ll provide technical direction and mentoring for less experienced colleagues, while 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 can stay ahead in an evolving digital world.
You’ll share our collective responsibility to keep the country safe. We actively encourage engineers to learn about our mission and build relationships with people working in those teams. There are lots of opportunities to help you understand how MI5 really works.
You’ll be expected to take ownership of large problems, breaking them down and delivering new features across the whole engineering lifecycle. As a team player you’ll provide support on products owned by the team, and be prepared to provide support, when necessary, working with users to identify and fix defects and automating tests to maintain the assurance of our continuous integration pipelines. You’ll participate in agile ceremonies, guilds and cross-organisation initiatives.
We use agile methodologies to deliver products that are core to MI5’s operation, working to the full spectrum of investigative, analytical and corporate areas of the organisation. We make use of modern approaches and cloud technologies such as AWS and Azure. We’re moving our development to use Cloud Native data technologies as part of our longer-term vision. There’ll be lot of opportunities to work on this throughout your career with MI5.
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 and build experience in a wide number of technologies or develop a deep specialism in their preferred area. We embrace a DevSecOps mindset, where 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’re operating legally or tooling to improve our developer experience, the nature of our work presents unique and fascinating engineering challenges, the like(s) of which you’ll have never seen before.
About You
You’ll need to
- Have proven communications skills. Using your practitioner understanding of data engineering to use the appropriate language for the audience and able to listen to the needs of technical and business stakeholders and interpret them
- Act as a technical lead within your teams responsible for the design and delivery of moderate to complex data flows utilising agile methodologies as part of a development team in collaboration with data architects, development teams, product owners and testers
- Have knowledge of technologies such as Apache Kafka, Apache NiFi, SAS DI Studio or other data integration platforms
- 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. Using knowledge of various formats including XML, JSON, flat file, Parquet etc.
- Have working knowledge of design patterns and are able to select and implement them appropriately
- Are able to understand and manage metadata across your development teams systems and beyond, with a practitioner working knowledge of data provenance and data lineage tools and methods and are able to provide oversight and advice to other data engineers within your team
- Will promote data innovation in your own teams and be willing to experiment on new techniques and practices
- Will work to agreed and recognised standards to build solutions using various traditional or big data languages such as SQL (Oracle), PL/SQL (Oracle), SAS Macro Language, Python, Scala, Apache Spark, Java, Javascript etc. Using various tools including SAS, Hue (Hive/Impala), Kibana (Elastic Search)
- Knowledge of data management on Cloud platforms especially advantageous
- Work to a modern standards approach and promote best practice within your team
Training and Development
Learning and development is central to our engineering ethos and we’ll invest heavily in you. As part of your MI5 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. You’ll have access to a wide variety of classroom and online learning, as well as certifications and our own development programmes. We work with external bodies such as the Institute for Engineering and Technology and the British Computing Society to support and fund accreditation for our staff, which could be in a specific technical area or more broadly, such as becoming a Chartered Engineer.
You’ll receive a starting salary of £54,214 for London and £52,874 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
- Opportunities to work flexibly or part time (minimum coverage of 3 days), subject to business needs
- 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
Culture and Working Environment
- Ethnic Minority and gender equality networks
- Groups supporting wellbeing, mental health, neurodiversity and disability
- Faith/No Faith communities for staff to come together
- LGBTQ+ support networks
You’ll also find a variety of sports, activity, interest and social groups to help you settle in and connect with people with similar interests.
Before You Apply
To work at MI5, you need to be a British citizen. We do 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.
Honesty and integrity are really important if you want to work at MI5. Take some time to read about the vetting process and make sure you meet the criteria in the vetting pages of the ‘How to Apply’ section. The process can take some time, but this is just because it’s thorough. Giving misleading information and omitting or concealing information during the recruitment and vetting process is viewed very seriously.
The role is based in London or Manchester, so you’ll need to live within a commutable distance. Please consider any financial implications and practicalities before submitting an application.
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.
Equal Opportunities
At MI5 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, ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, ages, 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.
We’re Disability Confident
MI5 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) are:
- Passing a sift of your application
Eligibility Criteria
To be eligible to apply, you must be a British Citizen. If you hold dual nationality, of which one component is British, you will nonetheless be considered. For more info please click here. Candidates must normally have been resident in the UK for seven out of the last ten years. This is particularly important if you were born outside the UK. You can apply at the age of 17 years, if successful you will not be offered a start date prior to your 18th birthday. Discretion is vital. You should not discuss your application, other than with your partner or a close family member. 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 of the UK will impact on our ability to progress your application. Further information on our eligibility criteria can be found on the Applying section.
What to Expect
Our recruitment process is fair, transparent, and based on merit. Here is a brief overview of each stage, in order:
- You will be invited to upload your CV and complete an online application form
- If you pass, you’ll be invited to an interview
- If you pass, you’ll start our vetting process
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.
Our Vetting
To work in this role, you will need the highest security clearance, known as Developed Vetting (DV). It’s something everyone in the UK Intelligence Community has to go through and it can take some time. As part of the DV process you will be asked to fill in a detailed questionnaire and attend an interview with a vetting officer. In your interview the vetting officer will have a thorough, compassionate and honest discussion with you about you as a person and your life experiences, to ensure holding a DV clearance is right for you. You don’t need to do any preparation for your vetting interview, just be honest and be yourself. All applicants for DV are treated impartially and consistently, irrespective of gender, race, disability, religion, age, sexual orientation and other protected characteristics.
