Senior Data Platform Engineer

Aker Systems was founded in 2017 by a team of experienced technology professionals who recognised an opportunity to provide highly secure enterprise data platforms to large organisations. We build and operate ground-breaking, ultra-secure, high performance, cloud-based data infrastructure for the enterprise. Our proprietary technology solutions drive performance and reduce costs while helping our clients to improve the management and sharing of data across their organisations.

In 2024, Aker Systems won the Breakthrough Culture Awards highlighting growth companies putting culture first. In 2020 Aker Systems was recognised as a 'One to Watch' on the Sunday Times Tech Track. The Company was also recognised at the Thames Valley Tech Awards 2020; winning the Thames Valley Tech Company of the year, the Emerging Tech Company and High Growth Tech Business categories. We encourage people of all different backgrounds and identities to apply. We are committed to maintaining an inclusive, and supportive place for you to do your very best work.

Due to the nature of the project,

UK Government Security Check (SC) clearance is required

.

We are looking for a

Senior Data Platform Engineer

to design, build and operate secure, scalable and reliable data platform capabilities across client delivery projects in the

public sector and utilities

.

You will work closely with Data Engineers, Software Engineers, Architects, DevOps Engineers and client stakeholders to develop and maintain cloud-native data platforms supporting batch, real-time streaming, analytical and operational workloads .

This is a hands-on engineering role focused on building reliable platform services, automating infrastructure and deployments, supporting production environments and contributing to technical design decisions.

Strong experience with cloud platforms, distributed systems and real-time streaming technologies is highly desirable

data platform services and components

.

batch and real-time data workloads

.

Kafka, Kinesis, Spark, Flink or equivalent technologies

.

AWS and/or Azure

.

data models, schemas and platform data structures

.

CI/CD pipelines

for data platform workloads.

Infrastructure as Code

to create repeatable and maintainable environments.

root cause analysis

.

Essential Technical Skills & Experience

cloud-native data platforms

.

Java and/or Python

.

real-time streaming and event-driven architectures

, including Kafka, Kinesis or equivalent.

Spark, Flink, Kafka Streams

or equivalent.

AWS and/or Azure

cloud environments.

S3, Glue, Lambda, RDS, Athena, EC2

or Azure equivalents.

relational and NoSQL databases

.

CI/CD and DevOps practices

.

Terraform or equivalent Infrastructure as Code technologies

.

Docker and/or Kubernetes

.

GitHub/GitLab

and modern source control practices.

observability

for platform services.

Agile and/or DevOps delivery environments

.

Desirable:

Helm, ArgoCD, Airflow, dbt, Bash, Ansible, Packer, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK or Datadog.

public sector, utilities or other regulated environments

is advantageous.

Data Platform Engineering

As a Senior Data Platform Engineer, you will take ownership of complex platform engineering activities within your client delivery team.

You will:

data platform components and services

.

performance, scalability, security and reliability

.

Cloud, Infrastructure & Automation

You will work across modern cloud and infrastructure technologies, including:

AWS and/or Azure

cloud services.

Terraform or equivalent

.

Docker and Kubernetes

containerised environments.

Experience & Qualifications

You should have

5+ years of relevant professional experience

across Data Engineering, Data Platform Engineering, Software Engineering, Platform Engineering or a similar technical discipline.

For a Senior-level appointment, you should demonstrate strong hands-on technical capability, ownership of complex platform engineering activities and the ability to work independently within client delivery environments

• Design, develop, test and deploy
• Build and maintain platform capabilities supporting
• Develop and operate distributed data services using
• Build and maintain cloud-native data platform capabilities using
• Support data ingestion, processing, storage and integration across multiple systems.
• Develop and maintain
• Support schema evolution, data quality and data integrity across distributed platforms.
• Integrate data platforms with relational and NoSQL databases.
• Develop automated testing and validation for platform services and data processing components.
• Implement and maintain
• Use
• Support Docker and Kubernetes-based platform environments.
• Monitor platform services and investigate failures, performance issues and operational problems.
• Participate in incident investigation and
• Support platform performance, scalability, resilience and availability improvements.
• Contribute to platform security, governance and operational readiness.
• Work closely with Software Engineers, Data Engineers, DevOps and Architects.
• Participate in technical design discussions, code reviews and engineering standards.
• Contribute to continuous improvement of platform engineering practices.
• Strong commercial experience as a Senior Data Platform Engineer, Senior Data Engineer, Platform Engineer, Software Engineer or similar .
• Strong hands-on experience building and operating
• Strong programming experience using
• Hands-on experience with
• Experience with distributed data processing technologies such as
• Strong experience with
• Experience with cloud services such as
• Strong understanding of data platform architecture, data pipelines and distributed processing .
• Experience with
• Strong SQL skills and understanding of data modelling and schema design.
• Experience with
• Experience using
• Experience with
• Experience using
• Experience implementing monitoring, logging and
• Experience supporting production systems and resolving technical and operational issues.
• Understanding of platform security, resilience, scalability and availability.
• Experience working within
• Experience working within
• Build and maintain reliable
• Contribute to technical design and implementation decisions.
• Develop reusable and maintainable platform patterns.
• Support data ingestion, processing, storage and integration capabilities.
• Identify platform risks relating to
• Contribute to platform performance tuning and optimisation.
• Participate in code reviews and promote clean, maintainable engineering practices.
• Support production troubleshooting and root cause analysis.
• Share knowledge and support less experienced engineers.
• Contribute to improving platform automation, reliability and engineering standards.
• Infrastructure as Code using
• CI/CD using GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins or equivalent.
• Automated provisioning and configuration.
• Monitoring, logging, alerting and observability.
• Platform security and access controls.
• Resilience, backup and disaster recovery considerations.

You are a hands-on Data Platform Engineer who enjoys building and operating the infrastructure and services that make modern data platforms work reliably in production .

You are comfortable working across cloud platforms, streaming, distributed systems, data processing, Infrastructure as Code and containerisation .

You understand that effective data platforms need to be

secure, scalable, observable, resilient and maintainable

, not simply capable of processing data.

You take ownership of your work, enjoy solving complex technical problems and work well with engineers across different disciplines.

You are pragmatic, technically curious and focused on delivering reliable platform capabilities that create measurable value for clients .

Experience working within public sector, utilities or other complex and regulated environments would be highly advantageous.

Aker Systems Attributes

In return, we offer a competitive salary, 25 days holiday plus bank hol

• At Aker we work as a team; we are collaborative, hardworking, open, and delivery obsessed.
• There is no blame culture here: try things, and take responsibility for the outcomes.
• You are always part of the wider Aker.
• We help our colleagues and take pride in successfully achieving difficult tasks.
• We run towards problems and help to solve them.
• Communicate always, do so accurately and in a timely fashion.