Senior Data & AI Engineer - Azure Platform & ML Ops

RES; Gateshead; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

RES, a leading renewable energy company, seeks a Senior Data and AI Engineer to design and operate data pipelines powering analytics and AI initiatives. You will shape an enterprise data platform, set standards, and drive automation and MLOps across the full stack from ingestion to feature-ready datasets.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with architecture and governance teams, and advance data quality, observability, and scalable AI-enabled data products across the business.

Qualifications

• Degree in computer science, data engineering, software engineering, or related field — or equivalent hands‑on experience.
• Significant experience (typically 7+ years) delivering enterprise-grade data engineering solutions in production environments.
• Proven track record as a Senior Data Engineer, including building large-scale data systems and architectural decisions.
• Deep expertise in the Microsoft Azure data ecosystem — ADF, Synapse, Fabric, Purview, Unity Catalogue.
• Advanced Python skills for production data pipelines and libraries.
• Strong experience building and maintaining production data infrastructure for AI/ML use cases.
• Experience with MLOps: CI/CD for data pipelines, automated testing, and infrastructure as code.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and operate reliable, secure, and observable data pipelines and curated datasets for enterprise reporting, analytics, and AI/ML.
• Own engineering quality, performance, and cost optimisation with robust data quality controls, testing, monitoring, and observability.
• Build and maintain production-grade data infrastructure on Azure / Fabric, including data lakes and lakehouses.
• Produce feature-ready datasets and optimised data products for data scientists and analytics teams.
• Lead AI/ML engineering use cases and model pipelines at scale with best practices.
• Define and implement CI/CD pipelines for data engineering workflows and apply infrastructure-as-code.
• Lead engineering automation to reduce manual effort, improve reliability, and accelerate time-to-insight.
• Apply containerisation and orchestration tooling (Docker, Airflow) to production data workflows.
• Drive architectural decisions and partner across architecture, governance, modelling, and reporting.
• Mentor engineers and set engineering standards for quality and rigour.

Skills

Azure data platform

Python

SQL

AI/ML engineering

MLOps

Data quality & observability

LLMs and GenAI

Technical leadership

Education

Degree in computer science, data engineering, software engineering, or related field

Tools

Azure Data Factory

Synapse

Microsoft Fabric

Purview

Unity Catalogue

Docker

Airflow

dbt / Prefect

Job description

RES, a leading renewable energy company, seeks a Senior Data and AI Engineer to design and operate data pipelines powering analytics and AI initiatives. You will shape an enterprise data platform, set standards, and drive automation and MLOps across the full stack from ingestion to feature-ready datasets.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with architecture and governance teams, and advance data quality, observability, and scalable AI-enabled data products across the business.