Principal Data Engineer
Welcome to Public Health Wales, the national public health organisation for Wales
Our vision is Working to achieve a healthier future for Wales
To find out more visit Public Health Wales and watch this video about our Strategic Plan
Working together, with trust and respect, to make a difference
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Applicants are invited to apply in Welsh, any application submitted in Welsh will not be treated less favourably than an application made in English. To support our all Wales service, we particularly welcome applications from Welsh speakers.
Please be advised that there is a temporary top up for Bands 2 and 3 to reflect the incorporation of the top up to the living wage of £12.60 per hour - £24,638 per annum.
This temporary top up will be in place until the annual pay uplift for 2025/26 is confirmed.
Job overview
Are you looking for a pivotal role, where you can leverage your extensive experience in data engineering and architecture to design and implement robust data solutions that drive business insights and decision-making?
We are looking for a Principal Data Engineer to lead a growing team and to own and help deliver our Digital and Data strategy. Your leadership will be instrumental in setting technical direction and mentoring engineers to optimize our data pipelines and infrastructure.You will collaboratively develop and maintain data models, architecture, and integration strategies so that the organisation can use its data well and safely. You are equally as comfortable in your expert role, designing and delivering solutions, as you are engaging with business owners and teasing out their user needs, building relationships with other DDaT professions and coaching less experienced data engineers.
Main duties of the job
You’ll be leading the work to design and populate the data architecture for our local cloud environment, ensuring that our future data services can be secure and scalable. You’ll also take a lead role in delivering our analytical data into the NHS National Data Analytics Platform.
By building robust data platforms, pipelines, and catalogues and by defining the metadata, models and schema that underpin our data decision-making, you’ll be right at the heart of modernising and improving the way we do things.
You’ll be working collaboratively with other senior leaders, business stakeholders and a variety of digital, data and technology professionals so that we can modernise, unify and automate our data processes across the organisation.
Working for our organisation
We are Public Health Wales – the national public health agency in Wales. Our purpose is ‘Working together for a healthier Wales'. We exist to help everyone in Wales live longer, healthier, happier lives. Together with our partners, we work to increase healthy life expectancy, improve health and well-being, and reduce inequalities for everyone in Wales, now and for future generations.
Our teams work to prevent disease, protect health, and provide leadership, specialist services and public health expertise. We are the leading source of public health information, research and innovation in Wales. In a world facing complex health challenges, our work has never been so important.
We are guided by our Values, 'Working together, with trust and respect, to make a difference'. We are committed to building an inclusive workplace that values equality and diversity. We welcome applications which represent the rich diversity of the communities we serve and are supportive of flexible working arrangements, including part time roles and job sharing.
To find out more about working for us and the benefits we offer please visit https://phw.nhs.wales/careers/
For guidance on the application process, please visit https://phw.nhs.wales/working-for-us/applicant-information-and-guidance/
Detailed job description and main responsibilities
Accountabilities
Your accountabilities will include but not limited to:
- Define and implement enterprise data models, pipelines, and metadata management
- Develop and maintain data platform components (e.g. data catalogue, data lake, warehouse, ETL frameworks)
- Ensure data security, compliance, and the ethical use of data in accordance with standards and requirements such as GDPR and Cyber Essentials Plus
- Oversee robust data ingestion and integration frameworks that ensure data consistency, accuracy, and timeliness across our systems.
- Collaborate with business, product, and engineering teams to understand data needs and translate them into scalable technical designs and roadmaps.
- Continuously evolve our data infrastructure to improve performance, reduce latency, and enhance data accessibility across the organisation.
- Provide technical guidance to data engineers and analysts, fostering a culture of engineering excellence and continuous learning and setting engineering standards
- Support the delivery of strategic projects
Please refer to the attached job profile for more details.
Key Skills, Knowledge and Experience:
- Advanced SQL and scripting skills (e.g., Python, TSQL, PowerShell) for data engineering, automation and orchestration tasks.
- Strong ability to define and implement modern enterprise data architectures, including data lakes, data warehouses, and data mesh/data fabric concepts
- Experience designing logical and physical data models (e.g., star schema, snowflake, third normal form), with strong understanding of master and reference data management.
- Strong understanding of modern enterprise data architecture principles, including data warehousing, data lakes, and relational databases.
- Experience working with Azure/GCP and related cloud tools such as Big Query,
- Knowledge of data integration patterns and technologies (e.g., ETL, ELT, API-first), including near real-time and event-driven approaches.
- Experience collaborating with business stakeholders, analysts, and developers to translate business needs into technical solutions.
What you'll bring to the team:
- Proven experience as a Principal Data Engineer in a hands-on role, with leadership and management skills to match your technical expertise.
- Deep expertise in cloud platforms such Azure and GCP
- Strong proficiency in data modelling, data warehousing, and ETL/ELT architecture at scale.
- Advanced programming skills in SQL and Python and a collaborative, CI/CD approach to pushing code; experience with orchestration and data pipeline tools.
- Experience with implementing data governance frameworks and ensuring compliance with regulatory standards.
- Familiarity with ML/LLM data needs and setup
- Effective communication and stakeholder engagement skills, with the ability to influence at all levels of the organization.
- A collaborative mindset, coupled with a passion for mentoring and leading by example in a high-performing team environment.
You will be able to find a full Job description and Person Specification attached within the supporting documents or please click "Apply now" to view on Trac.
The ability to speak Welsh is desirable for this post; Welsh and/or English speakers are equally welcome to apply.
Person specification
Qualifications and Knowledge
Essential criteria- • Master’s degree or equivalent knowledge and skills in data engineering or related discipline, for example (but not limited to) computer science, data science, information technology, software engineering, or other discipline with a substantial data engineering component
- • Evidence of continuing professional development and practical application of learning in data engineering
Experience
Essential criteria- • Demonstrable experience of collaboration and communication skills, working with technical and non-technical stakeholders to identify, articulate, document and deliver users’ data needs
- • Experience of Agile development, and leading the successful Agile delivery of digital / information / data change programmes, improving business processes with data and automation
- • Experience of developing delivery plans, establishing work priorities, delegating effectively, ensuring a capability to deliver, monitoring performance and giving feedback
- • Good experience in data warehouse techniques, including dimensional data modelling, relational database design and concepts and entity relationship diagrams
- • Able to develop partnerships across organisational boundaries and drive multi-disciplinary collaboration to achieve desired outcomes, working with business stakeholders to translate business problems into data solutions
- • Experience of data profiling and source system analysis, including reverse-engineering data models from a live system, and presenting clear insight to technical and non-technical stakeholders to support end-use of data
- • Experience interpreting and applying national guidance, legislation to determine its applicability to the Directorate and Trust, and recommend relevant actions required to improve adherence; can understand and apply compliance and data management best practice guidelines
- • Experience in using agreed standards and tools to design, code, test, correct and document moderate-to-complex programs and scripts from agreed specifications and subsequent iterations
Skills and Attributes
Essential criteria- • Excellent technical skills and knowledge in Python / R, Power BI and Power Apps, Google Cloud Platform, cloud-to-on-prem engineering, Azure DevOps, SQL, SQL servers, SSMS and SSIS, dashboards, databases and visualisation, APIs, including understanding and application of good practice
- • Ability to demonstrate understanding and application of our workplace values, together with the underpinning behaviours identified for success in this role
- • Excellent analytical, IT Keyboard and numerical skills - confident with statistics and their presentation.
- • Excellent verbal and written communication, including presentation and report / position paper writing skills.
- • Ability to analyse highly complex issues where material is conflicting and drawn from multiple sources (verbal, written and numerical).
- • Significant ability to analyse numerical and written data, assess options and draw appropriate initiatives
- • Demonstrable ability to plan over short, medium and long-term timeframes and adjust plans and resource requirements accordingly, working effectively with stakeholders
- • Demonstrable ability to work effectively between competing activities where required.
- • Demonstrable ability to manage own workload and make informed decisions in the absence of required information, working to tight and often changing timescales
- • Experience working in Azure
- • Welsh Language Skills are desirable at levels 1 to 5 in understanding, speaking, reading, and writing in Welsh
Other
Essential criteria- • Willingness and ability to travel between sites in a timely manner to meet the needs of the service
Public Health Wales, reserves the right to close this vacancy early. We therefore encourage early applications.
Priority is given to staff awaiting redeployment. We therefore reserve the right to withdraw this advert at any stage.
If you have a disability and have any particular requirements to enable you to participate in the application process, please contact [email protected]
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR APPLICANTS: Applications for our roles are carefully reviewed and shortlisted based on specific criteria, which varies from job to job. Using a generic application to apply for multiple roles or relying on automated AI application services, such as Lazy Apply or AI Apply, may not provide the necessary information, leading to your application being overlooked.To ensure your application is given full consideration, we recommend submitting a tailored application that directly addresses the criteria listed in the Person Specification section of the advert.
If you are successful and short listed for interview you will be contacted by email using the address with which you registered. Please ensure you check your email account regularly.
We are committed to fair, transparent recruitment and believe in equality of opportunity in our workplace and will not tolerate discrimination on grounds of age, disability, gender identity, religion or belief, race or nationality, marriage or civil partnership status, sex, sexual orientation, working pattern, caring responsibilities, trade union activity or political beliefs – or on any other grounds.We welcome applications from individuals seeking flexible working arrangements.
To work in the UK, all candidates who are not UK or Republic of Ireland (RoI) nationals require sponsorship to obtain either a Health and Care visa or Skilled Worker visa, unless you have permission to work via another route. Non UK / RoI candidates wishing to apply should self-assess the likelihood of obtaining a Certificate of Sponsorship by visiting Work in the UK.If you are eligible for the Health and Care visa, application costs are lower and you do not need to pay the annual Immigration Health Surcharge.
The salary scale shown is for a full-time member of staff, with the amount being adjusted pro rata for those working less than 37.5 hours per week.
In general, anyone joining our Trust who has not previously worked in the NHS will, by default, start on the first point of the advertised pay band. Pay progression will then be determined by annual Performance and Development Reviews in accordance with the NHS Wales Pay Progression Policy.An application for Incremental Credit may be considered, but can only be awarded based on evidenced, reckonable service and/or equivalent, relevant experience.