Junior Data Engineer (SC Cleared)
Junior Data Engineer
Location: UK-based, hybrid working
Security Clearance: Active SC clearance required OR BPSS
Experience: 3+ years
Working Style: Agile, product-led digital delivery
We are looking for a Junior Data Engineer to support the design, build and operation of scalable and reliable data platforms for digital services.
This role is aligned to DDaT standards and will suit someone with strong SQL fundamentals, good data engineering basics and exposure to cloud, APIs, containers and streaming technologies.
You will work under the guidance of senior engineers to develop data pipelines, support data stores, maintain data quality and help ensure data is secure, reliable and available.
Important: Candidates must already hold active SC clearance or be able to demonstrate current SC clearance status.
Role Responsibilities
You will support the build and maintenance of batch and streaming data pipelines using technologies such as Kafka and cloud-native services.
You will work with relational databases including AWS Aurora PostgreSQL, writing SQL queries for reporting, analytics and data validation.
You will support containerised data workloads using Docker and gain exposure to deployments on Kubernetes platforms.
You will assist with logical and physical data modelling and contribute to data warehouse structures, including star and snowflake schema concepts.
You will support data validation, reconciliation and monitoring to ensure data assets are accurate, reliable and fit for use.
You will also help integrate data from internal and external systems via REST APIs, working with JSON payloads, API authentication, pagination and basic error handling.
Essential Skills
- Strong SQL fundamentals, including joins, aggregations and subqueries
- Understanding of ETL / ELT concepts and data pipelines
- Exposure to Apache Kafka or similar streaming platforms
- Basic knowledge of AWS services, especially managed databases
- Awareness of Docker and Kubernetes concepts
- Understanding of REST APIs, HTTP methods and JSON payloads
- Ability to consume data from APIs as part of data pipelines
- Good problem-solving skills and ability to troubleshoot basic data issues
- Active SC clearance OR BPSS
Desirable Skills
- Experience with AWS Aurora PostgreSQL
- Basic understanding of data modelling techniques
- Familiarity with data warehousing concepts
- Experience integrating third-party or internal APIs
- Familiarity with Swagger / OpenAPI
- Awareness of API security, including tokens, API keys and OAuth
- Exposure to Git
- Understanding of Agile delivery principles
Experience Required
- 3+ years’ experience in data engineering, analytics or software engineering
- Exposure to cloud data platforms in a delivery environment
- Comfortable working in a multidisciplinary agile team
- Experience working in product-led digital delivery environments would be beneficial
This is an excellent opportunity for a developing Data Engineer to gain hands-on experience across cloud data platforms, SQL, APIs, streaming, containers and modern digital delivery.