Data Engineer - IT Services - 105678 - Grade 8

Position Details

IT Services

Location: University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham UK

Full time starting salary is normally in the range £46,735 to £55,755 with potential progression once in post to £62,728

Grade: 8

Full Time, Fixed Term contract up to June 2027

Closing date: 9th June 2025

Our offer to you

People are at the heart of what we are and do.

The University of Birmingham is proud to have been a part of the City of Birmingham and the wider region for over 100 years, and we are equally proud to be recognised as a leading global university. We want to attract talented people from across the city and beyond, support them to succeed, and celebrate their success.

We are committed to helping the people who work here to develop through our sector-leading Birmingham Professional programme which provides all professional services staff with development opportunities and the encouragement to reach their full potential. With almost 5,000 professional services jobs in a wide-range of functions in Edgbaston and in our campus in Dubai, there are plenty of opportunities for you to be able to develop your career at the University.

We believe there is no such thing as a typical member of staff and that diversity is a source of strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation, and debate. We warmly welcome people from all backgrounds and are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where diversity is at the heart of who and what we are, and how we work.

Supporting our people to achieve a healthy work/life balance is important both to our employees and to the success of the University and, depending on the role, we offer a variety of flexible working arrangements. We therefore welcome discussions on all forms of flexible working. In addition, you will receive a generous package of benefits including 40 days paid holiday a year, one paid day a year for volunteering, occupational sick pay, and a pension scheme. We also have three high quality subsidised day nurseries.

The University is situated in leafy Edgbaston and there are excellent transport links to our beautiful campus, including main bus routes and a train station on site. On campus we have a state-of-the-art sports centre with pool, shops, places to eat and drink, our own art gallery, museum and botanical gardens.

Find out more about the benefits of working for the University of Birmingham

Background

The role of IT Services is to ensure that the University of Birmingham community has access to responsive, resilient, secure and accessible systems and support. Our technologies enable our students, staff, researchers, visitors, and partners to confidently and creatively use digital services, technology and data for the benefit of their learning, teaching, research or work. 

IT Services are building a culture of innovation, collaboration, openness, and inclusivity, and we apply the principles of customer focus and continuous improvement to everything we do. We want to attract outstanding, inspirational, and talented people, support them to succeed, and celebrate their success. Our IT Services division has an active People and Culture network and Women in IT group, bi-annual making IT happen awards recognition programme, and Social Committee which arranges regular activities and events for colleagues. 

With a new Digital Strategy, this is an exciting opportunity to join the team making IT happen at the University of Birmingham.

Role Summary

The University has a requirement for a Lead Business Intelligence (BI) Developer who has significant skills and experience in Cloud data warehousing and systems analysis/design.

We are looking for a Data Warehouse Engineer with extensive experience of Snowflake Cloud based data platform. The primary focus of this role will be the development of the Snowflake data warehouse environment working within our Data Team and will include using ETL and Modelling tools and Tableau/Power BI for reporting and data visualisations. 

As the ideal candidate you will be adept at working with large data sets to develop advanced, scalable Data Warehouse solutions from end-to-end. The University is still at the early stages of building a Cloud based Data Warehouse based on Snowflake hosted on MS Azure. The basic architecture has been established, and various system components talk to each other but there is still a lot to do, and this will be a huge opportunity for the right person to take ownership of the Data Platform working within the Data Team and delivering our Data Strategy. You will be a hands-on Data Engineer who thrives on working in a varied and challenging environment and will use your technical knowledge to advice on how we are ingesting data, what they are ingesting and how the Data Team are using insights to drive key business decision making. You must have strong experience using a variety of data architecture/data modelling techniques. You must also have a proven ability to design, develop and implement advanced data warehousing solutions and be comfortable working with a wide range of stakeholders and functional teams to understand business needs. 

This is a hybrid role with 2 days on campus each week.

Main Duties

Systems design

• Specifies and designs large or complex business intelligence solutions. 
• Selects appropriate software design standards, methods and tools, consistent with agreed enterprise and solution architectures and ensures they are applied effectively. 
• Reviews others' systems designs to ensure selection of appropriate technology, efficient use of resources, and integration of multiple systems and technology. 
• Contributes to policy for selection of architecture components. 
• Evaluates and undertakes impact analysis on major design options and assesses and manages associated risks. 
• Ensures that the system design balances functional, service quality, security and systems management requirements.

Programming/data lifecycle development

• Contributes to local or team-based standards for BI programming tools and techniques, including security guidelines, and the selection of appropriate development methods. 
• Advises on application of standards and methods and ensures compliance. 
• Takes technical responsibility for all stages and/or iterations in a Data development project, providing method specific technical advice and guidance to project stakeholders. 
• Assigns work packages, monitors performance and manages change control dynamically, to optimise productivity. 
• Provides advice, guidance and assistance to less experienced colleagues as required.

Software release and deployment

• Assesses and analyses release components. 
• Provides input to scheduling. 
• Carries out the builds and tests in coordination with testers and component specialists maintaining and administering the tools and methods – manual or automatic - and ensuring, where possible, information exchange with configuration management. 
• Ensures release processes and procedures are maintained.

Business intelligence methods and tools

• Provides expertise and support on use of methods and tools.

Emerging technology monitoring

• Maintains awareness of opportunities provided by new technology to address challenges or to enable new ways of working. 
• Within own sphere of influence, works to further organisational goals, by the study and use of emerging technologies and products. 
• Contributes to briefings and presentations about their relevance and potential value to the organisation.

Technology leadership and innovation

• Provides organisational leadership and guidelines to promote the development and exploitation of business intelligence solutions in the organisation. 
• Recognises potential strategic application of business intelligence development capabilities. 
• Initiates and manages investigation and development of innovative methods, practices and technology, to the benefit of the organisation. 
• Plays an active and dynamic role in improving the interface between all interested parties, facilitating knowledge flow to enable sharing and development of creative ideas.

Relationship and stakeholder management

• Implements stakeholder engagement including handling of problems and issues to resolution (taking ownership) and producing corrective actions and lessons learned where applicable. 
• Uses feedback from customers and stakeholders to help measure effectiveness of stakeholder management. 
• Helps develop and enhance customer and stakeholder relationships.

Other duties

• Actively manages equality, diversity and inclusion through monitoring and evaluation and actively challenging unacceptable behaviour. 
• Supports the University’s sustainability agenda through resource efficient working. 
• Any other duties commensurate with the grade.

Required Knowledge, Skills, Qualifications, Experience

• Educated to degree level or equivalent qualification plus substantial work experience in a relevant technical/scientific and/or management/supervisory role in a specialist area. A higher degree may also be held. Where no equivalent qualification is held a proven track record of extensive and substantial work experience in a series of progressively more demanding and relevant roles will be required.
• Proven technical specialist knowledge and understanding in a relevant technical area (specialists will require advanced technical expertise).
• Snowflake certified with relevant hands on experience.
• ETL tools – how to build data pipelines using cloud ETL Tools (Azure Data Factory an advantage) with advanced data ingestion techniques.
• Tableau/ Power BI experience of integration with a cloud warehouse.
• Data architecture and modelling experience (e.g. facts and dimensions, materialized views, etc).
• Experience of modelling in Data build tool (DBT).
• Experience with the Python programming language or similar. 
• Experience with source control systems such as GIT. 
• Experience of working agile teams using methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban.
• Experience of supporting junior developers.
• Experience of RESTful and GraphQL API integration.
• Experience of developing and using continuous integration and development. pipelines, with tools such as Azure DevOps, TeamCity, or Jenkins.
• Data Warehouse Design - a demonstrable and broad understanding of best practices, common issues and how to solve them.
• Advanced skills in SQL.
• API experience with Change data capture capabilities in Snowflake.
• Ability to present findings in a structured, clear manner with actionable insights.
• Excellent communication skills for translating data insights into concise executive summaries and presentations.
• Evidence of literacy and numeracy.
• Experience of championing Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in own work area. 
• Ability to monitor and evaluate the extent to which equality and diversity legislation, policies, procedures are applied. 
• Ability to identify issues with the potential to impact on protected groups and take appropriate action.

Informal enquiries to Julian Kobylarz, email: j.kobylarz@bham.ac.uk 

View our staff values and behaviours here 

We believe there is no such thing as a 'typical' member of University of Birmingham staff and that diversity in its many forms is a strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation and debate at the heart of University life. We are committed to proactively addressing the barriers experienced by some groups in our community and are proud to hold Athena SWAN, Race Equality Charter and Disability Confident accreditations. We have an Equality Diversity and Inclusion Centre that focuses on continuously improving the University as a fair and inclusive place to work where everyone has the opportunity to succeed. We are also committed to sustainability, which is a key part of our strategy. You can find out more about our work to create a fairer university for everyone on our website.