Data engineer (sc clearance required)

Location: Fully remote (no multi-site travel required)

Contract Type: Permanent / or 12-month Fixed Term Contract (with a view going perm)

Employer: Amber Labs – Digital Consultancy

Clearance: Active SC Clearance required.

Start Date: Immediate

About Amber Labs

Amber Labs is a forward-thinking digital consultancy delivering innovative cloud, data, and DevOps solutions across the UK public sector. We specialise in helping organisations achieve digital transformation at pace while maintaining the highest security and governance standards.

We are seeking a Data Engineer who can integrate into an existing data delivery team, operate with strong autonomy, and contribute meaningfully from day one.

The successful candidate must demonstrate strategic technical ownership, the ability to lead data engineering streams, and — critically — prior exposure to the end client or wider public sector.

Role Overview

This role is suited to a strong mid-to-senior level engineer with solid experience in data engineering, ETL processes, cloud infrastructure, and streaming technologies. The successful candidate will work closely with analysts, data consumers, and technical stakeholders to ensure data is reliable, accessible, and fit for operational and analytical use.

The role combines hands-on engineering with strong collaboration and stakeholder engagement.

ETL & Data Engineering Practices (Essential)

• Strong understanding of ETL and modern data engineering practices.
• Proven experience:
• Extracting and transforming raw data.
• Designing reusable transformation pipelines.
• Delivering structured datasets for reporting and analytics.
• Ability to:
• Build maintainable and scalable pipelines
• Optimise data flows and processing efficiency
• Handle large and complex datasets reliably

Core Technical Skills

Streaming & Messaging Technologies

• Good practical understanding of Apache Kafka
• Experience working with:
• Event-driven data pipelines
• Streaming ingestion patterns
• Asynchronous processing architectures
• Understanding of:
• Topics and partitions
• Consumer groups
• Data reliability and ordering considerations

AWS & Cloud Data Engineering (Essential)

• Strong hands-on experience with Amazon Web Services
• Experience designing and supporting cloud-native data platforms
• Strong understanding of:
• Data storage patterns
• Scalability and reliability
• Secure data handling in AWS environments
• Experience with AWS services such as: S3/ Lambda / IAM / Glue
• Redshift or equivalent data services

Infrastructure as Code

• Hands-on experience with Terraform
• Ability to:
• Provision and manage cloud infrastructure
• Maintain reusable and version-controlled infrastructure definitions

Databricks (Nice to Have)

• Exposure to or experience with Databricks
• Understanding of:
• Distributed data processing
• Notebook-driven development
• Spark-based workloads

Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement

• Work closely with:
• Data analysts / Data scientists / Engineers / Business stakeholders
• Translate business and analytical requirements into technical solutions
• Communicate technical concepts clearly to non-technical audiences where needed

Apply Now and help shape the future of UK digital services with Amber Labs.