Associate Data Engineer

We’re 1st Central, a market-leading insurance company utilising smart data and technology at pace. Rapid growth has been based on giving our 1.4 million customers exactly what they want: great value insurance with an excellent service. And that’s the same for our colleagues too; we won Insurance Employer of the Year at the British Insurance Awards 2024 and our Glassdoor score is pretty mega too!

Are you passionate about data?  Do you have experience in Python, VBA, SQL or a similar coding language? 

We’ve got an amazing opportunity for an aspiring data enthusiast to join us as an Associate Data Engineer—come be part of something great!

In this hands-on technical role, you’ll be at the heart of building innovative data solutions—contributing to impactful projects and long-term data products. You’ll take well-defined work packages and transform them into powerful data pipelines and robust database solutions that drive real value. You’ll apply technical problem-solving skills, and good data management discipline to any tasks or work packages allocated and will demonstrate a natural curiosity and hunger to learn new data technologies and techniques.

We're big on flexibility - you'll spend most of your time working from home, with the occasional visit to the office, but of course, it’s your choice - if you prefer to be in the office more - that's good with us too.  We've offices located in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, Salford Quays, Manchester, and Guernsey it’s your choice - or maybe you live further afield, we’ll accept applications for remote workers who are based in the UK or Guernsey.

Core skills we’re looking for to succeed in the role:  

Technical Skills: You'll have hands-on experience in Python, VBA, SQL or a similar coding language.

Creative Problem Solving: You’re a creative problem solver who enjoys tackling challenges with fresh thinking.

Proactive Learning: You’re proactive, with a genuine thirst for learning and self-improvement.

Time Management & Organisation: You’ll have strong time management and organisational skills to stay on top of priorities.

Team Collaboration: You thrive in collaborative environments and enjoy working toward shared outcomes.

Resilience Under Pressure: You’re resilient and perform effectively under pressure, even in demanding situations.

Positive Energy & Motivation: You bring energy and positivity, motivating others with your “can do, will do” attitude.

Quality-Focused Execution: You’re able to follow standards and design carefully, ensuring your work is consistently high quality.

Attention to Detail: You’ll have a keen eye for detail and take pride in precision.

What’s involved:

• You’ll develop low to mid complexity, secure, governed, high quality, efficient data pipelines from a variety of on and off premise, internal and external data sources.
• You’ll ensure that data is cleansed, mapped, transformed and optimised for storage to meet requirements for business and technical use cases.
• You’ll build data observability and data quality by design into all Data pipelines, promoting self-testing pipelines that proactively identify processing issues or discrepancies.
• You’ll build solutions that pipe transform data into data lake storage areas, physical database models and reporting structures across data lake, data warehouse, business intelligence systems and analytics applications.
• You’ll build physical data models that are appropriately designed to meet business needs and optimise storage requirements, ensuring maximum re-use.
• You’ll carry out unit testing of own code to ensure appropriate quality.
• You’ll maintain effective, and appropriate documentation that brings transparency and understandability to pipelines created and code created.
• You’ll follow coding standards, architectural principles, solution design/architecture and release management processes to ensure safe, high quality, compliant code.
• You’ll create low to mid complexity BI solutions including data mart, semantic layer, and reporting & visualisation solutions in recognised BI tools such as Power Bi.

Experience & knowledge

• Proven to be a good communicator with an experience of building rapport with others.
• Experience of being able to learn and adopt new technologies.
• Some experience in Python, VBA, SQL or any other coding language.
• Keen and active interest in the use of data.
• Knowledge of how the use of data can drive value for businesses.
• Broad understanding of the data lifecycle.
• Aware of Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD).

Skills

• A creative problem solver.
• Proactive and a thirst for learning.
• Very good time management and organisation skills.
• Must have the ability to work as part of a wider team focussed on shared outcomes.
• Resilient and comfortable able to work effectively in demanding situations.
• Energetic and proactive, and someone who motivates others by their “can do, will do” attitude.
• Able to follow standards and designs, ensuring their work is of high quality.
• Attention to detail.

This is just the be beginning.  Imagine where you could end up! The journey’s yours to shape

What can we do for you?

People first. Always. We’re passionate about our colleagues and know the best people deserve an extraordinary working environment. We owe it to them so that’s what we offer. Our workplaces are energetic, inspirational, supportive. To get a taste of the advantages you’ll enjoy, take a look at all our perks in full here. 

Intrigued? Our Talent team can tell you everything you need to know about what we want and what we’re offering, so feel free to get in touch.