Data Engineer

Reporting to the Data Product Manager in Customer Network Design , this is an opportunity to play a critical role in shaping the data that underpins essential customer operations. As a Data Engineer in our Customer Network Design team, you'll be at the heart of delivering high-quality, resilient, and scalable data products, driving best-in-class engineering practices across the full data lifecycle-from ingestion and modelling through to curated, trusted, and reusable data products.

You'll take real ownership of your work-leading data engineering activities end-to-end and setting the standard across pipeline development, information modelling, and data quality. With a strong focus on customer data products and CRM-based sources, your impact will be visible, ensuring our data is not only reliable, but trusted at scale.

Information modelling sits at the core of this role. You'll design and evolve the logical, physical, and canonical models that give our data structure and meaning-providing the foundation that makes pipelines consistent, data products reusable, and engineering faster and safer to change. This is a hands-on engineering role where you'll design, build, and evolve robust data pipelines and well-structured data assets, creating clean, maintainable, high-performing code.

Alongside this, you'll play a key part in uplifting data engineering capability, supporting and mentoring junior Data Engineers and analysts, helping them adopt modern engineering approaches, strong modelling discipline, and effective configuration management practices.

Working closely with other Data Engineers and cross-functional teams, you'll help ensure consistent standards, governance, and high-quality delivery, aligned with wider Group engineering practices and long-term technology strategy., As a Data Engineer, you'll play a key role in ensuring we deliver high-quality, resilient, and scalable data products that support critical customer and network operations. You'll take ownership of delivery across the full lifecycle, driving excellence in both engineering and data quality standards. In this role, you will:

• Own and evolve our data pipeline capabilities - building and maintaining a robust, well-engineered ingestion and transformation codebase that supports the programme from initial delivery through to ongoing change
• Lead on information modelling - designing and maintaining logical, physical, and canonical/semantic models that underpin and accelerate engineering activity, ensuring consistency, reusability, and clear meaning across our data products
• Drive the integration of customer and CRM-based sources - bringing together data from CRM platforms (e.g., Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365) and other operational systems into curated, governed, customer-facing data products
• Champion best-in-class data engineering practices, working closely with Data Architects, Product Owners and Data Engineers to ensure consistent use of tools, standards, and engineering approaches
• Design and develop high-quality data products and pipelines, covering both functional and non-functional requirements
• Lead on non-functional concerns, including performance, scalability, security, and cost-efficiency-ensuring data platforms are reliable, secure, and scalable
• Build and maintain traceability between source data, models, and data products, creating reusable assets, well-documented lineage, and comprehensive regression and validation packs
• Collaborate with stakeholders across the business to ensure the right data is available, well-understood, and fit for purpose ahead of delivery
• Analyse pipeline and data-quality outcomes and provide clear, actionable insights, highlighting progress, risks, issues, and opportunities for improvement
• Drive high-quality issue and defect management, ensuring data issues are clearly documented with all necessary detail to support efficient resolution
• Investigate complex issues across pipelines and environments, working hands-on to support root cause analysis and resolution
• Act as a guardian of data quality, proactively identifying risks and escalating concerns to ensure standards are never compromised
• Play an active role in Agile delivery, ensuring blockers and challenges are surfaced and resolved through ceremonies and team collaboration
• Support and uplift others in the team, sharing knowledge and helping junior Data Engineers and analysts adopt modern, engineering-led practices

You're a passionate Data Engineer who thrives on building high-quality, scalable data products and continuously improving how teams approach data. You bring a strong engineering mindset, a problem-solving attitude, and a drive to model, automate, and elevate data quality standards. To succeed in this role, you'll bring:

• Strong programming expertise in SQL and/or Python with a focus on writing clean, maintainable, and scalable code

• Proven experience in data and information modelling-logical, physical-and a clear understanding of how strong models support and accelerate engineering activity

• Hands-on experience with modern data pipeline and ETL/ELT frameworks such as dbt, and a passion for building robust, well-engineered solutions

• Strong experience integrating CRM and customer data sources (e.g., Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365) and other operational systems, using APIs and modern integration patterns

• Exposure to cloud data platforms such as Azure (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, Fabric), with experience building and running pipelines in cloud-based environments

• A solid understanding of both batch and streaming data processing, and how to apply each effectively

• Strong experience in data quality, governance, lineage, and cataloguing, ensuring trusted and compliant data products

• A deep understanding of non-functional requirements, with the ability to translate them into effective, practical engineering approaches

• Experience integrating data delivery into CI/CD pipelines and DataOps practices, working with modern build and delivery tooling

• A clear grasp of test- and quality-led engineering principles and how they support reliable data delivery

• Knowledge of data security approaches and an awareness of risks within enterprise environments

• A strong track record of working in Agile teams, actively contributing to delivery, collaboration, and continuous improvement

• The confidence to work autonomously, take ownership, and adapt in fast-paced, evolving environments

• Experience with software engineering tools such as Git, and code quality tools

It would be great if you also have:

• Experience to data visualisation (e.g., Power BI), Streamlit or data catalogue/governance tooling

A competitive salary between £48,000 - £58,000 dependent on capability

As well as your base salary, you will receive

• 26 days holiday, plus eight statutory days, an option to buy extra holiday days, and the option to holiday swap up to 3 bank holiday days
• An annual performance incentive
• A generous pension scheme, double matched up to 6% of your salary each month. For every £1 you contribute we'll put in another £2, so if you put in 6%, we'll add 12% giving a total of 18% to your pension pot
• Life insurance at 10 times basic salary
• Employer funding towards a portion of your Private Medical Insurance.
• You will also have access to a number of flexible benefits such as a share incentive plan, salary sacrifice car and technology schemes, support via employee assistance lines and matched charity giving to name a few.

At National Grid, we light up the world by harnessing the unique strengths of our people. Join us as a Data Engineer to be part of a team that's driving forward the energy transition, creating a brighter, more sustainable future for all. Unleash your superpower and bring energy to life., In NGET we are passionate about both operating our network safely and providing highly reliable quality of supply for our customers. At the heart of achieving these outcomes is the effective control and operation of our network. To find out more about us, please follow the link below: https://www.nationalgrid.com/electricity-transmission/ DE & I statement At National Grid, we work towards the highest standards in everything we do, including how we support, value and develop our people. Our aim is to encourage and support employees to thrive and be the best they can be. We celebrate the difference people can bring into our organisation, and welcome and encourage applicants with diverse experiences and backgrounds, and offer flexible and tailored support, at home and in the office. Our goal is to drive, develop and operate our business in a way that results in a more inclusive culture. All employment is decided on the basis of qualifications, the innovation from diverse teams & perspectives and business need. We are committed to building a workforce so we can represent the communities we serve and have a working environment in which each individual feels valued, respected, fairly treated, and able to reach their full potential. Please note that in most cases, National Grid is unable to offer sponsorship for employment under the UK points-based immigration system. As such, applicants must have the legal right to work in the UK without requiring sponsorship now or in the future under the UK points-based immigration system. However, in exceptional circumstances where there is a clear and demonstrable need for specialist skills that cannot be sourced from the local labour market, National Grid may consider offering sponsorship. All applications are welcome from candidates who meet these requirements, regardless of race, nationality, or ethnic origin.