Senior Data Engineer

Benifex; Southampton; Hybrid; GBP 80,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading technology firm in Southampton is looking for a Senior Data Engineer to help build a scalable data platform. In this pivotal role, you will create data engineering pipelines and collaborate with data professionals. Required experience includes designing cloud-native data solutions, proficiency in Python and SQL, and familiarity with tools like Snowflake and Apache Airflow. The position offers a competitive salary, generous benefits, and a flexible working model including work-from-home options.

Benefits

Competitive salary (£80,000-90,000)

Flexible working arrangements

Annual learning budget

Comprehensive benefits package

25 days holiday plus bank holidays

Healthcare cash plan

Enhanced parental leave

Qualifications

• Experience designing data engineering pipelines on cloud platforms.
• Proficient in creating data models using dimensional and graph techniques.
• Strong Python skills and experience with SQL.

Responsibilities

• Implement scalable data engineering pipelines for analytics.
• Create a great data development experience for users.
• Instill a DataOps culture across data infrastructure.

Skills

Data engineering pipeline design

Cloud data platforms (GCP, Snowflake)

Python programming

SQL performance optimization

Data orchestration tools

Tools

Snowflake

Apache Airflow

Terraform

Docker

Job description

Who are Benifex? 💚💜

We are a fast-moving technology company, and one of the most successful providers of online reward and benefits solutions in the world. We believe that everyone deserves an exceptional experience at work, every day, and build workplace technology that makes this happen. Benifex’s mission is to build remarkable experiences that employees love. Today Benifex supports more than five million employees in over 3,000 organisations across more than 100 countries. To help us on our quest to be the best, we need brilliant people on board and that’s where you come in. 🚀

Why should you apply? 🌟

• Challenge: Implement a scalable data platform to meet our internal and external analytics needs.
• Impact: Be one of the first hires to help build a world class data engineering function.
• Scale: A key pillar of our global growth plan is data, allowing us to make better decisions and deliver more value to our users.
• Top 10 Employer, Sunday Times Best Places to Work Awards
• Work for a profitable, fast-growing market leader in the online reward and benefits space

Please note we are unable to offer visa sponsorship and require to people to be based in the UK or Ireland for this position

Great benefits:

💰 £80,000-90,000

💻 Tech setup of your choice (MacBook Pro or equivalent, monitors, etc.)

📚 £/€800 annual learning budget, plus two hours per week as ‘Focus Fridays’.

🤸 Flexible work – choose a working setup that works for you, our only ask is to see you once a month in the office and you must be based in the UK or Ireland.

💸 Full access to our comprehensive benefits package, including discounts from hundreds of high street brands, salary sacrifice schemes across Finance, Health, Tech, and more

✈️ 25 days holiday plus your local bank holidays

🎂 Your birthday off

❤️ Two half day wellbeing days

🩺 Healthcare cash plan to cover the costs of day-to-day healthcare

🧠 Employee Assistance Plan 24/7 365 support

🤒 Income Protection (75%) and life assurance (4x salary)

💰 Referral bonuses

🌟 Enhanced parental leave package - 26 weeks fully paid maternity leave and 4 weeks fully paid paternity leave

✈️ Work from Anywhere policy for 90 days

🏖️ Buy and Sell scheme for holidays

💳 £50 monthly allowance to spend on whatever takes your fancy, your very own Benifex card will be topped up at the start of each month!

Role Overview 🚀

As a senior hire in Data Engineering, reporting into our Data Director, you will have the opportunity to lay the foundations for our data vision. We are at the start of our data journey at Benifex, and we recognise a strong foundational data platform is a key first step on that journey. Whilst we have data infrastructure on GCP in-place and used today, this is focused on one providing analytics to our customers. It’s not a data platform that has been designed with internal analytics in mind from the ground up, you will help design the platform architecture then build out the platform.

Data engineers are the people who enable everyone at Benifex to produce and consume data by leveraging the capabilities of the data platform (services such as Snowflake, Airflow, dbt and ThoughtSpot). They architect and implement the data platform infrastructure (e.g. using Terraform, Docker), and use it to collect and protect data from across our internally owned and externally procured systems landscape, to make available for consumption. A focus on a great analytical developer experience is important as well, so they manage the tooling that makes it easy to produce and consume data products (and services) from data on the platform. Ultimately, they make it possible for Benifex to combine, enrich and consume data safely at scale so we can better achieve our company mission.

Responsibilities 🤘

• Design and implement scalable data engineering pipelines and data models in our Snowflake data platform that can support our initial scaling needs for internal and external analytics.
• Craft a best-in‑class data development experience for data professionals (data analysts, analytics engineers, data scientists). Partner with and understand the needs of your users to make it safe, easy, and possible for all data professionals to build self‑serving data products with best practices.
• Drive the implementation of Test Driven Development (TDD), CI/CD, Infrastructure-as-Code, observability, monitoring and security practices across across all our data infrastructure and pipelines. Guide with best practices for instilling a culture of DataOps.
• Coach and mentor other data/software engineers, data analysts, and the broader business on data quality. Help other data engineers, analysts, or software engineers to understand the importance of good data creation principles and ensure we are capturing all the data we need in the correct formats and the correct latencies.

What are we looking for? 🔎

• Demonstrable experience of designing and building data engineering pipelines on a cloud‑native data platform (preferably on GCP or Snowflake) at a start‑up (or scale up) in the past, and supporting the development needs of data analysts, analytics engineers, and data scientists.
• Demonstrated expertise in modern data architecture and modelling techniques, encompassing traditional dimensional modelling (star, snowflake and galaxy schemas), and graph data model
• Able to execute across the data engineering lifecycle (up‑to transformation at minimum), from building data platform infrastructure to data modelling (via dbt) in a cloud environment (e.g. BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks).
• Proven Python software engineering skills (e.g. an understanding of concepts such as decorators, generators, context managers, typing).
• Proven experience with SQL (e.g. parsing JSON files, complex joins, complex calculations using CTEs etc) and performance optimisation of queries.
• Experience with or knowledge of data pipeline orchestration tools (e.g., Apache Airflow, Dagster, Prefect) as well as monitoring and observability tools such as Grafana is desirable.
• Ideally hands‑on experience using infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g. Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation) and containerisation (e.g. Docker).

General engineering traits that we look for:

• Taking ownership: A mindset of holding yourself and others accountable, someone who can be relied on in challenging situations, a bias to action.
• Passion for technology: Someone who invests in their craft and self learning, a continuous improvement mindset, a focus on best practices, and someone keen to see how new tools/technology can be applied to business problems.
• Open mindedness: Strong opinions loosely held, you're open to ideas, and seek feedback and input from others.
• Excellent communicator: An effective communicator to technical and non-technical audiences, able to break down complex information into simple to understand language.
• Natural problem solver: someone who thrives on solving technical challenges, who has a methodical way to work through problems and offer pragmatic solutions

Even if you don't meet all of the requirements for this role, we encourage you to apply! We are looking for talented and passionate individuals who are eager to learn and grow. We also offer a variety of other roles, so please check out our careers page to see if there is something else that might be a good fit for you.

Our interview process

✌ Benifex understands the need to have a fast and efficient process, the below will all be completed in the shortest time possible.

📞 Initial informal call with the Talent team

⏳ Interview with our Engineering Manager 30 min

🧪 Technical Task

🔎 Technical Interview - 60 min

🤩 Final interview with VP of Engineering - 30-45 min

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone feels welcome and respected. We believe that diversity and inclusion are essential to our success, and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.

We are a proud member of the Disability Confident employer scheme.

If you require any reasonable adjustments at any stage during the recruitment process, please let us know with your application.