Length of employment:
Job Summary:
Are you an experienced data engineer with experience in either the AWS or Azure cloud enterprise stack? Would you like to enhance your skills in both?
Does transforming the customer experience for millions of UK citizens sound interesting?
If so, this role may be perfect for you!
We are looking for highly experienced Lead Data Engineers with proven experience of working in a large-scale data driven organisation, leading design, build, test and deployment activities for data services that are focused on self-service and data quality.
DWP is the UK's largest government department. We help people into work and make payments worth over £195bn a year to support the most vulnerable people in our society.
DWP Digital creates digital services that almost everyone in the UK relies on at some point in their lives. We're carrying out a once-in-a-generation digital transformation - a task of size and scale unmatched elsewhere.
If you enjoy collaborating with users and stakeholders to understand their needs and are looking for a data engineer role that is more than just coding, we'd love to hear from you. We can offer you opportunities to:
- Work with genuinely interesting use cases and data sources.
- Make a big difference to the lives of millions of vulnerable citizens.
- Shape our next gen platform capability, ways of working, and future direction of data exploitation.
Our team consists of data engineers, data scientists, digital performance analysts, testers, content designers, user researchers, and Power BI specialists.
Job Description:
DWP is the UK's largest government department. We help people into work and make payments worth £195bn a year to support the most vulnerable people in our society.
DWP have big ambitions to become a data driven organisation through delivery of our data strategy. These are key roles leading our data engineering delivery in our Data & Analytic hub Data Platform Team, and, within our Health domain data team.
You will be responsible for providing technical direction for data engineering across our data architecture, ensuring we provide reliable, trusted, interoperable data to meet our user needs across DWP, in other government departments and with private sector partners. This includes providing technical patterns and guidance, building our data engineering capability and ensuring our data products and pipelines are built using the right techniques in how we ingest, prepare (through ETL processing), store and use data using the most appropriate method, eg - balancing low-code and cloud native loosely coupled components You will have lead accountability for business acceptance testing as migration to new platforms are rolled out.
As Lead Data Engineer you will be responsible for leading teams in collecting upstream user technical requirements that need to be implemented as part of platform migrations and configuration. You will also have line management responsibility for data engineers within the platform team, and will provide direction for data engineering across all our hub and domain aligned platform teams. You will work closely with teams across digital group and wider Data & Analytics, including our data practice, to ensure we adopt consistent approaches and provide continuous development for our data engineers.
You will be a key part of our technical leadership in data platforms within the Data & Analytics hub or Health domain spoke. Day to day you will provide data engineering leadership and direction for a number of digital and data experts who work in multi-disciplined agile teams.
Please note this role requires you to passSecurity Checkclearance. For further information, please see 'Selection process details'.
We also have a broad benefits package built around your work-life balance which includes:
- Working patterns to support work/life balance such as job sharing, term-time working, flexi-time and compressed hours.
- Generous annual leave - at least 25 days on entry, increasing up to 30 days over time (pro-rata for part time employees), plus 9 days public and privilege leave.
- Support for financial wellbeing, including interest-free season ticket loans for travel, a cycle to work scheme and an employee discount scheme.
- Health and wellbeing support including our Employee Assistance Programme for specialist advice and counselling and the opportunity to join HASSRA a first-class programme of competitions, activities and benefits for its members (subscription payable monthly).
- Family friendly policies including enhanced maternity and shared parental leave pay after 1 year's continuous service.
- Funded learning and development to support progress in your role and career. This includes industry recognised qualifications and accreditations, coaching, mentoring and talent development programmes.
- An inclusive and diverse environment with opportunities to join professional and interpersonal networks including Women's Network, National Race Network, National Disability Network (THRIVE) and many more.
This job role may be suitable for hybrid working, which is where an employee works part of the week in their DWP office and part of the week from home. This is a voluntary, non-contractual arrangement and your office will be your contractual place of work. The number of days that anyone will be able to work at home will be determined primarily by business need but personal circumstances and other relevant circumstances will also be taken into account. If you are successful, any opportunities for hybrid working, including whether a hybrid working arrangement is suitable for you, will be discussed with you prior to you taking up your post.
Salary Information
Pay for this role is from £72,664 to £89,995.
The maximum salary for the grade is £77,740, however a Digital Allowance of up to £12,255 per annum is available for exceptional candidates. Digital Allowance is non-salary, and non-pensionable, and is classed as a temporary allowance. It is reviewed annually where it could be retained, amended, or removed.
Our offer to successful candidates will be based on an assessment of your skills and experience as demonstrated at interview.
Existing Civil Servants who secure a new role on lateral transfer should maintain their current salary.
Existing Civil Servants who gain promotion may move to the bottom of the grade pay scale or 10% increase in salary whichever would be the greater.
See selection process for further details.
If you would like to learn more about the role, please contact .
Stage 1: Application
Your application will consist of four parts:
1. A Personal Details application form.
2. Employment history - this should contain your work experience and any skills, qualifications and accomplishments relevant to the jobs you have completed.
3. Personal statement - up to 750 words. This statement should be used to provide examples of how you meet the essential criteria below:
- Provides the vision and strategic direction for data engineering, ensuring initiatives are aligned to organisation strategy and objectives.
- Ability and experience of predicting and advising on future technology changes that present opportunities for improvement of DWP platform and tooling tech portfolio.
- Experience leading teams though large-scale data and platform transformation programmes, ensuring best practice and building capability whilst maximising the functionality of incoming technology.
- Experience of delivering migration to modern data platforms including Data Warehouse, Lakehouse, and implementing cross-government/industry Hub and Spoke architecture patterns.
- Experience and detailed understanding of AWS and/or Azure data provision through a loosely coupled cloud stack including Data Integration (ETL/ELT) eg Spark and/or Informatica, Data Quality, Data Catalogue, data storage to provide multi-cloud analytical and insight data for our critical data analyst and data science community.
- Detailed knowledge of establishing engineering standards across multiple platforms and native toolsets. Experience of implementing these standards across platforms and leading technical teams in keeping those standards up to date and ensuring adherence to them.
- Experience of leading and mediating between key stakeholders and developing relationships; communicating with stakeholders at all levels and cross government. Includes manage stakeholders' expectations and facilitating discussions across high risk and complexity or under constrained timescales.
4. Technical statement (up to 250 words). The following statement is aligned to the required technical skill of: Technical Breadth.
- Give an example of when you have provided the vision and strategic direction for data engineering, ensuring initiatives are aligned to organisation strategy and objectives.
Please use an example from your experience, using the STAR technique to structure your example.
The sift panel will use the information in your employment history, personal statement, and technical statement to assess your experience, skills and knowledge.
An initial sift will be conducted using the technical statement. Candidates who pass the initial sift will be progressed to a full sift.
Applications will be sifted at regular intervals from the date the posts are advertised. Please apply as soon as you can, do not wait until the end of the campaign.
Important Information
- You will be asked to complete your employment history. Any information that you would customarily share on a CV should therefore be entered onto the application form.
- Personal details that could be used to identify you including your name, contact details and address must be removed for your application to be considered.
- If your employment history, personal statement or technical statement contain any personal details your application will be withdrawn.
- We recognise that AI may be helpful when applying for this role, but it is important to use it in the right way. Read the DWP AI Candidate Guide to understand how you can make the best use of GenAI while ensuring your application remains authentic and effective.
Stage 2: Interview
If you're successful at sift stage you will be invited to a video interview via Microsoft Teams. There, you will be assessed against the experiences listed above.
You will also be asked to do a 10-minute presentation on the following:
Please spend 10 minutes telling us about a time when you have re-designed a data platform that was critical to business decisions. How did you address key areas of concern for example unreliable data pipelines and inconsistent data sets?
The use of visual aids such as PowerPoint is optional. There will be a further 5 minutes for questions.
Interviews will take place from end of June 2025. Interview dates to be confirmed.
Other information:
If high application volumes are received, the benchmark for candidates to proceed to the next stage may be raised. In line with our commitment to the Disability Confident Scheme (DCS), we aim to advance all candidates applying under the DCS who meet the minimum standard. However, we may only progress those candidates who best meet the required standards.
All successful candidates and those placed on reserve will be posted in merit list order by location.
Security Clearance Requirement
You must meet the security requirements before you can be appointed. The level of security needed is security check.
For meaningful checks to be carried out, you will need to have lived in the UK for a sufficient period of time, to enable appropriate checks to be carried out and produce a result which provides the required level of assurance. Whilst a lack of UK residency in itself is not necessarily a bar to a security clearance, and expectation of UK residency may range from 3 to 5 years. Failure to meet the residency requirements needed for the role may result in the withdrawal of provisional jobs offers.
For further information on National Security Vetting please visit the Demystifying Vetting website .
Further Information:
Find out more about Working for DWP.
For Hints and Tips on completing your application visit Applying for jobs at DWP Digital.
A reserve list may be held for a period of 6months from which further appointments can be made.
All successful candidates and those placed on reserve will be posted in merit list order by location.
The Civil Service values honesty and integrity and expects all candidates to abide by these principles. Please ensure that all examples provided in your application are taken directly from your own experience and that you describe the examples in your own words. Applications will be screened and if evidence of plagiarism or copying examples/answers from other sources is found, your application will be withdrawn. Internal DWP candidates may also face disciplinary action.
Reasonable Adjustment
At DWP we value diversity and inclusion and actively encourage and welcome applications from everyone, including those that are underrepresented in our workforce.
We consider visible and non-visible disabilities, neurodiversity or learning differences, chronic medical conditions, or mental ill health. Examples include dyslexia, epilepsy, autism, chronic fatigue, or schizophrenia.
If you need a change to be made so that you can make your application, you should: Contact Government Recruitment Service via as soon as possible before the closing date to discuss your needs.
Complete the "Reasonable Adjustments" section in the "Additional requirements" page of your application form to tell us what changes or help you might need further on in the recruitment process. For instance, you may need wheelchair access at interview, or if you're deaf, a Language Service Professional.
For further information on reasonable adjustments, terms and conditions and how we recruit visit the How We Recruit page .
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