Data Engineer

At Smart, our mission is to transform retirement, savings and financial wellbeing, across all generations, around the world.

The Role

As part of the Backend Engineering function, and reporting to the Data Engineering Tech Lead, the Data Engineer will be working on planning, engineering and maintaining clients’ data warehouses, ETL processes and other data pipelines. As Smart’s client base grows we will be delivering data pipelines for each client who requires it. This is an opportunity to be involved in the design, deployment and maintenance of data pipeline solutions across multiple clients.

The Smart Data Engineering team is accountable for:

• Maintenance of the UK Smart Data Warehouse and associated ETL routines
• Maintenance of the underlying data for BI reports and dashboards, used throughout the organisation
• Data engineering support when migrating large new clients onto Smart’s Keystone platform
• Validating significant changes to system functionality, particularly in relation to those that might impact members’ pension holdings
• Maintaining client data extracts which integrate with some of our clients’ systems
• Implementing new and/or improved data pipelines which help expand core Keystone functionality, empowering users with more immediate and direct access to critical data

About you

As a Data Engineer you’ll get a kick out of interacting with data in all its forms. More importantly, you get excited by the prospect of using data to solve problems. If you can use your skills to solve a business problem, that’s a great day’s work for you.

You will need to have strong skills in database technologies as well as Python. You’ll also be able to talk to techies and non-techies alike and make suggestions about solutions to problems that can be understood and implemented.

Smart strives to provide a comfortable, relaxed working environment and the Data Engineering team is no different. We take great pride in our work and strive to hit sometimes challenging deadlines, but we like to make sure that people are enjoying their work as we do it. This is not an easy balance to strike but being open and honest with each other is an important step in the right direction.

Main Responsibilities:

• Work with stakeholders to identify new data sources that would add business value
• Implementing new data pipelines for new or existing clients
• Maintaining existing data pipelines and handling errors as necessary
• Monitoring the performance, security and scalability of the data pipelines
• Evaluating the existing data warehouse solution to determine necessary updates and integration requirements and make sure final designs meet the clients needs
• Impact assessing change requests, ensuring that changes don’t break existing workflows

Requirements

The skills, experience and aptitudes we are looking for are listed below. If it all sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you.

Please don’t be discouraged from applying if you don’t meet every single one of these criteria – having a ‘can do’ attitude is sometimes more important than being able to tick every box.

•  4+ years’ work experience in Python Development - with a focus on data analysis/migration/engineering
• 5+ years’ work data engineering, with proven experience in Data Modelling
• Experience in writing, troubleshooting, and debugging complex SQL queries
• Experience writing, troubleshooting, and debugging Python Code (v 3.9+)
• Ability to write automated Python tests (unit, functional, and integration) to ensure code works as expected
• Experience of extracting data from REST APIs and manipulating/loading it into a database
• Working knowledge of Snowflake or Redshift data warehouses
• Experience with ETL/ELT processes and tools (preferably with Matillion and/or Apache Airflow)
• Hands-on experience with AWS (notably ECS and S3)
• Financial services experience
• Experience designing and implementing data warehouses

• Experience developing and maintaining Apache Airflow DAGs to implement data pipelines
• Hands on experience using DBT to manage and implement data transformations
• A working understanding of Docker
• Experience working with big data and/or MPP (massively parallel processing) databases
• Experience supporting applications running on Amazon AWS 
• Experiences in Continuous delivery and automation pipelines using Github Actions

Who we are

We work in partnerships with governments and financial institutions in the UK and internationally. Our cloud-native digital platform is revolutionising how people around the world think about, and save for, their retirement. 

At heart, we’re a financial technology business. What we do is all about innovation, and using the power of digital change to put the customer first. Our Engineers will tell you that working at Smart gives you the opportunity to play your part in developing world-class technological solutions, working with – and learning from – like-minded people.

You’ll also find that, across our business, our colleagues love Smart’s culture, and how what we do means better financial outcomes for savers. That feels worthwhile, and it means that what we do, collectively, goes way beyond the nine to five of a typical working day.
Don’t just take our word for it – you can see what our colleagues say about working at Smart on LinkedIn Life and Glassdoor.

Benefits

At Smart, one of the eight principles we work to is “We want happy and good people in our team”. We created a list of benefits that helps us achieve this goal: 

• 25 days’ holiday per year, increasing with length of service.  
• £500 annual training budget to spend on your professional development 
• Extensive private healthcare, including dental, eyecare and EAP 
• Enhanced sick leave (three months’ pay per year)
• Enhanced maternity and paternity (maternity – 6 months fully paid/paternity – 3 weeks fully paid)
• Death in service insurance cover 
• Fully-paid five-week sabbatical after five years of employment
• In office wellbeing, such as manicures, massages and barbers. We also serve free lunch, breakfasts and social drinks weekly. 
• Smart employees also enjoy a 50% discount on orders from our sister company Arena Flowers, Britain's most ethical florist. They offer unique hand-tied bouquets, luxury flowers, letterbox flowers, plants and gifts to spend on friends and loved ones or even for yourself.

Visit our careers page at www.smart.co/careers to find our Recruitment Data Policy. 

Please click on the link if you have any questions about how we store your data or to know your rights.

We think Smart is an awesome place to work. If it sounds like somewhere you’d like to work, too, and if you’re ready to play your part in our continued success in the future, then naturally we’d love to meet you.