Data Engineer

Contract Data Engineer – Central London – Outside IR35 – Up to £600/day

We're partnering with a major energy trading player that's in the middle of a multi-year digital transformation. They're rebuilding their data stack from the ground up and need a sharp contract Data Engineer who can get hands-on fast and push things forward without hand-holding. Three days a week on site in Central London.

You'll be dropped straight into Stage One of a large Digitalisation Program, working in a team that's building next-gen data infrastructure, pipelines, and AI/ML enablement tooling. If you're the type who wants to shape real industrial systems rather than churn out toy projects, this is the right environment.

What you'll be doing

• Building, testing, and maintaining data pipelines across ETL and ELT workloads.
• Helping users navigate the big data platform, ingest new data, and debug issues.
• Tackling complex integration challenges across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured sources.
• Pre-processing, cleansing, and delivering high-quality data for advanced analytics and modelling.
• Working closely with data scientists to help scale ML and AI models.
• Developing BI dashboards and optimising pipelines and frameworks for performance.
• Owning requirements, design, build, and maintenance of end-to-end data solutions.
• Using CI/CD tooling like Azure DevOps or Jenkins and following solid engineering practices.

What you need to bring

• Strong hands-on experience with Python (including Pandas) and PySpark or similar distributed frameworks.
• Confident SQL across TSQL, ANSI SQL, Spark SQL.
• Real experience with cloud data services (Azure Data Factory, Databricks, Synapse, or equivalents on AWS/GCP).
• Ability to dive deep into datasets, understand structure, and communicate insights clearly.
• Experience working with structured and unstructured data at scale.
• Bonus points for data lakes, open-source data tooling, data warehousing, hybrid cloud, or experience in commodities/trading.

Contract details

• Outside IR35
• Up to £600/day
• 2-33 days a week onsite in Central London
• Start ASAP

If you want to work on a genuinely forward-looking data program with real commercial impact, this is worth your time.