Your new role

As a Principal Data Engineer you will bring passion and creativity to help Highways England better understand, leverage and ‘demystify' data, to make it more meaningful to non-technical staff, and to build data capability across our organisation.  In this role you will work with a wide range of people across the organisation on an array of projects and be responsible for ensuring that all data captured, generated, stored, retained and distributed is modelled and managed appropriately. You will help to lead the specification, design and implementation of the next generation of data solutions within Highways England to support the development of the next Road Investment Strategy (RIS). You will help us to better understand what data we own, manage, and use. You will extract insight from data to understand how we can better connect the country. You will discover opportunities for data acquisition and be in control of innovative new data products in order to help us engage the supply chain and our stakeholders. As Principal Data Engineer will also own key parts of our ‘Data-as-a-Service' platform, including our Azure cloud architecture for data analysis and reporting.

This is a newly created position and a great opportunity for you to come into an organisation and growing team that is heavily investing in an IT transformation that will allow you to professionally develop and use your experience to improve data efficiency and reliability driving the toward automated, reliable and secure services.

We are happy to accommodate flexible working arrangements, and welcome discussion around how we can make working for Highways England work for you.

What you'll be leading on

• Responsible for the design and implementation of numerous complex data flows to connect operational systems, data for analytics and BI systems.
• Define and lead verification and validation activities to provide assurance that data flows are designed, upgraded, managed, de-commissioned and archived in compliance with data policy across the full data life cycle
• Responsible for the whole life management data flow models
• Responsible for recognising and sharing opportunities to re-use existing data flows
• Responsible for the design and build of data pipelines and data streaming systems
• Coordinate teams and set data engineering best practice best practice and standards, and champion data engineering across the business, industry & government.

To be successful

• Experience of communicating between technical and non-technical staff and suppliers.
• Data profiling and conforming to data models in the public cloud.
• Understanding and experience of enterprise-scale data integration in the public cloud.
• Previous experience of lifecycle management of cloud platforms including infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, DevOps, and testing.
• Exceptional communication skills to convey complex information with enthusiasm to a wide audience.
• Ability and proven experience in making effective decisions using data.
• Ability to see the big picture, meeting wider public needs, and developing long term strategies.

A bit about us

The Information and Technology Directorate is a growing and vibrant team and there has never been a better time to join us as we go through our transformation programme.  We are helping to transform the way Highways England operates by delivering digital, data and technology services from frontline to back office, in a modern and efficient way. Our vision is to develop integrated information and technology that empowers our colleagues and provides real time information to our customers, integration with intelligent vehicle and transport systems as they develop, to improve journey safety and reliability. 

Want to know more?

If you would like a copy of the job profile please click the apply button.

Closing date: 21/01/2021

Interviews are planned to take place February 2021.

Why you should join us

At Highways England we believe in a connected country. We are passionate about creating a culture where colleagues feel connected, included and enjoy greater wellbeing to achieve this.  We're proud that as an organisation we are continually striving to do better and actively encourage and support our colleagues to do the same with their careers.

So, if you put safety first, take ownership of your work, show passion for what you do, work effectively in a team, and demonstrate integrity in how you do it - then you'll be a great fit for our organisation.

And finally

We reserve the right to close before the advertised closing date, so we recommend completing your application as soon as possible.

Contact Name: Highways England
Reference: TJ/6272/HIG04468
Job ID: 2886498