Data Engineer

We’re 1st Central, a market-leading insurance company utilising smart data and technology at pace. Rapid growth has been based on giving our 1.4 million customers exactly what they want: great value insurance with an excellent service. And that’s the same for our colleagues too; we won Insurance Employer of the Year at the British Insurance Awards 2024 and our Glassdoor score is pretty mega too!

We’re looking for a Data Engineer who thrives on building scalable, impactful solutions. Your work will power smarter decisions, unlock insights, and help us push the boundaries of what’s possible with data.

This is a hands-on technical role where you’ll design and build data solutions for both projects and long-term products. You’ll take ownership of developing and implementing data pipelines, designing and maintaining databases, and ensuring solutions align with our technical standards and data platform best practices.

We know great engineering isn’t tied to a desk. Whether you prefer working remotely in the UK or enjoy the occasional day in the office in either Haywards Heath, West Sussex or Salford Quays, Manchester, you’ll have the freedom to choose the setup that suits you best.

If you’ve strong experience with PySpark, Python and SQL, we’d love to hear from you. Apply today to learn more about this exciting role.

Core skills we’re looking for to succeed in the role:  

• Cloud & Data Engineering: You’ll bring expertise in modern cloud platforms, delivering scalable and robust data solutions, with engineering and database skills in PySpark, Python, SQL Server and/or Azure (Datafactory, Synapse) and the associated ETL technologies.
• Problem-Solving & Innovation: You’ll thrive on tackling complex challenges, finding creative solutions, and approaching every task with a proactive, optimistic mindset.
• Organisation & Delivery: You’ll balance multiple priorities with confidence, staying organised and focused. You’ll take pride in delivering high‑quality outcomes by following standards and designs, while suggesting improvements that raise the bar.
• Collaboration & Teamwork: You’ll thrive in a collaborative environment, working towards shared goals while supporting and mentoring less experienced engineers to achieve their potential.
• Energy & Motivation: With a proactive, positive approach, you’ll motivate those around you through your “can do, will do” attitude.

What’s involved:

• You’ll develop low to high complexity, secure, governed, high quality, efficient data pipelines from a variety of on and off premise, internal and external data sources
• You’ll ensure that data is cleansed, mapped, transformed and optimised for storage to meet requirements for business and technical use cases
• You’ll build data observability and data quality by design into all Data pipelines, promoting self-testing pipelines that proactively identify processing issues or discrepancies
• You’ll build solutions that pipe transform data into data lake storage areas, physical database models and reporting structures across data lake, data warehouse, business intelligence systems and analytics applications
• You’ll build physical data models that are appropriately designed to meet business needs and optimise storage requirements, ensuring maximum re-use
• You’ll carry out unit testing of own code, and peer testing of others code to ensure appropriate quality
• You’ll maintain effective, and appropriate documentation that brings transparency and understandability to pipelines created and code created.
• You’ll follow coding standards, architectural principles, solution design/architecture and release management processes to ensure safe, high quality, compliant code
• You’ll coach and mentor Associate data engineers.
• You’ll create low to high complexity BI solutions including data mart, semantic layer, and reporting & visualisation solutions in recognised BI tools such as PowerBI.

Experience & knowledge

• Requires experience of designing and building end to end data solutions (2-5 years).
• Engineering and database skills in SQL Server and/or Azure (Datafactory, Synapse) and the associated ETL technologies.
• Experience of working with large, event based, datasets in an enterprise environment.
• Experience of testing techniques and tools.
• Proven to be an excellent communicator with a desire to build rapport with others.
• Keen and active interest in the use of data, with active external networks.
• Brings ideas on how data can drive value for businesses.
• Good understanding of the full data lifecycle.
• Experience of Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
• Experience of working in an agile environment and self-managing teams

Skills & Qualifications

• An excellent creative problem solver.
• Proactive and optimistic about what can be achieved
• Very good time management and organisation skills with the ability to prioritise multiple demands
• Supporting and enthusiastic team player focussed on delivering shared outcomes.
• Comfortable advising and supporting less experienced engineers.
• Energetic and proactive, and someone who motivates others by their “can do, will do” attitude.
• Able to follow, and make recommendations to improve, standards and designs, ensuring their work is of high quality.

Bring your PySpark and SQL skills to the next level—apply now and discover an exciting career opportunity.

What can we do for you?

People first. Always. We’re passionate about our colleagues and know the best people deserve an extraordinary working environment. We owe it to them so that’s what we offer. Our workplaces are energetic, inspirational, supportive. To get a taste of the advantages you’ll enjoy, take a look at all our perks in full here. 

Intrigued? Our Talent team can tell you everything you need to know about what we want and what we’re offering, so feel free to get in touch.