Technical Data Engineer (CR1437) – Fixed-Term Appointment
| Posting date: | 07 July 2025 |
|---|---|
| Salary: | £41,220 to £44,500 per year |
| Additional salary information: | National: £41,220 - £45,400 London: £44,500 - £49,020 Pro-rata for job share |
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 18 July 2025 |
| Location: | Preston |
| Company: | Government Recruitment Service |
| Job type: | Temporary |
| Job reference: | 413627/11 |
Summary
The Science Directorate (SD) delivers high quality, high impact and highly relevant multidisciplinary science. Our People are diverse, talented, engaged and inspired to deliver innovative outcomes.
This is an exciting opportunity for a Technical Data Engineer to be involved in new improvements being made to APHA’s data that informs intelligence for animal diseases. This post is a fixed-term appointment, funded through the Cabinet Office as part of the National Biosurveillance Network Private Vet Labs Project.
The APHA’s Surveillance Intelligence Unit (SIU) is a multidisciplinary team that is responsible for collecting, collating, presenting and analysing livestock scanning (passive) surveillance data generated within APHA. Increasingly, data from third parties (including commercial private veterinary laboratories, veterinary practitioners and abattoirs) is also being harnessed to augment scanning surveillance outputs. The data and analyses are used to produce routine reports and other outputs relating to endemic diseases of animals in Great Britain for the benefit of a wide range of stakeholders, including the livestock industry, private veterinary surgeons and producers.
This new post is funded through the National Biosurveillance Programme (NBN), which is a component of the UK’s Biological Security Strategy (BSS), which outlines the UK’s cross government mission to achieve resilience to a spectrum of biological threats. The NBN aims to improve the UK’s ability to characterise and report biological risks across the One Health spectrum, reliably and rapidly. This includes improving ways of working to better record, share and utilise surveillance outputs, and bringing data together to generate a holistic picture of risks.
The post sits within a dedicated multidisciplinary NBN team in APHA and will work closely with the SIU team, in particular the team of Data Analysts within SIU.
This role will provide a data and information management function directly contributing to the outputs of the animal health scanning surveillance network in Great Britain.
The successful applicant will be directly involved in the collection, curation and analysis of animal health scanning surveillance data primarily by building, updating and maintaining automated data ingestion and processing pipelines in a cloud-based environment using existing APHA surveillance data as well as animal health data from third party sources that augments current outputs and enhances APHA’s scanning surveillance capabilities.
The post-holder will initially work with an existing developer team to define data handling capabilities within the SIU team and will be subsequently responsible for maintaining and scaling data ingestion processes to an increasing number of datasets. The post-holder will also provide functional management of other members of the SIU team, identifying suitable training opportunities and providing support and mentoring as required to deliver resilience of skills and experience across the team.
The SIU is a geographically dispersed team that works effectively at a distance using tools such as Microsoft Teams. However, it will be necessary to travel occasionally to other locations for training sessions and workshops where face-to-face participation is beneficial for both the individual and the team.
More information about the work of these teams is available at https://www.gov.uk/guidance/animal-disease-scanning-surveillance-at-apha
As part of on-going efforts to utilise scanning surveillance data from multiple external providers and collaborators, APHA is working to develop modern, cloud-based tools that will enable efficient and consistent data preparation, visualisation and analysis. Currently, a contractor delivery team is developing a system to enable secure data submissions through an online portal and the development of pipelines that will automate many of the data-handling tasks that are currently performed manually.
The post will work with the SIU and delivery teams to understand data-handling requirements for data from multiple providers and to make full use of the tools being developed to write and implement data pipelines that will efficiently – and where possible, automatically – ingest, process, store and prepare data for visualisation and further analysis.
The post will also help to characterise business change requirements as new tools enter business-as-usual workflow and will support and mentor existing members of the SIU team by identifying training requirements and appropriate learning opportunities to build team resilience and maximise potential benefits.
More specifically, in this role you will:
- Work with data providers and the delivery team to determine data processing and access needs and how best to deliver them.
- Create and support data pipelines and storage solutions (e.g. data warehouses).
- Develop and deliver automation of data infrastructure and deployments.
- Mentor team members to build resilience and expertise in data pipeline.
- Help improve the team’s data capabilities.
Proud member of the Disability Confident employer scheme