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# Data Engineer

- **Company:** Forward Role Recruitment
- **Location:** Cheltenham, UK
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** £50,000.0 - £85,000.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Artificial Intelligence, Amazon Web Services, Data Analysis, Microsoft Azure, Cloud Foundry, Continuous Integration, Data Infrastructure, Data Integration, Data Migration, Python (Programming Language), Meta-Data Management, SQL Databases, Feature Engineering, Apache Spark, Kubernetes, Machine Learning Operations, Devsecops, Docker
- **Published:** October 8, 2026
- **Apply:** https://www.forwardrole.com/jobs/182130dataengineer/#apply-now

## About the Role

Must have: commercial data engineering experience, strong Python and SQL, hands-on Spark, and cloud-native platform experience on AWS or Azure. Comfortable with Docker, Kubernetes and CI/CD.

Nice to have: data modelling and metadata management, AI/ML pipelines and feature engineering.

## Description

Tired of keeping pipelines alive? Move into a role where you own the architecture.

The customers are in Defence, Government and National Security, and the datasets are big, messy and multi-source.

You'll work closely with data scientists, software engineers and architects, and directly with the client, so you always know what the platform is for.

What you'll be working on

 * Data platforms and pipelines, batch and streaming, built for scale
 * Data lakes and cloud-native architecture on AWS or Azure
 * Ingesting and integrating data from lots of different sources
 * Data foundations for analytics, AI and ML workloads
 * DevSecOps and Infrastructure as Code
 * Python, SQL, Spark, Docker, Kubernetes and CI/CD

Why it's worth a look

 * Real influence over how platforms get designed and built
 * Close to the customer and the decision-makers
 * Exposure to AI/ML workloads, not just moving data from A to B