The Scale Factory on cord

The Scale Factory

Principal Data Consultant

External position
London, UK
Hiring internally for The Scale Factory?
Consultancy · Engineering
Empowering technology teams to deliver more on the cloud. We're an AWS and Kubernetes certified provider.
Active
over 6 months ago
Posted
4 days ago
Checked
cord regularly checks that external positions are still open
18 hours ago

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Data Engineer
Experience level: Senior, Lead, Leadership
Core skills considered: AWS, Databricks, Python, SQL
Other skills considered: Spark, dbt, Data Architecture, Cloud Computing

Logistics

Base salary: Undisclosed
Some companies on cord are unable to disclose salaries publicly due to internal company policies. Message the company for salary information.
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

You 9ll be the architect on our highest-impact data engagements. You will define the vision with senior clients, defend your design in front of CTOs and engineering teams, and stay grounded in the codebase to prove it works. When the project demands it, you 9ll step up as Tech Lead. Off-project, you 9ll help shape our practice: taking real-world learnings and building the reference architectures, repeatable propositions, and delivery standards that set the benchmark for everything we do next.


Key Responsibilities:

Client engagement leadership

  • Lead the architecture work on client engagements from discovery through to production
  • Run discovery and target-architecture workshops with client CTOs, heads of data and engineering leads
  • Translate commercial goals into an architecture and a sequenced roadmap the client can fund
  • Be the senior technical voice the client trusts when trade-offs, cost or risk are contested

Architecture ownership

  • Set and own the target data architecture: ingestion, storage, transformation, serving, governance
  • Make and document the significant decisions (lakehouse vs warehouse, batch vs streaming, build vs buy) with the trade-offs written down
  • Define non-functional requirements, cost models and FinOps guardrails alongside the functional design
  • Build in security, data protection, lineage and quality from the start, not as a later workstream

Hands-on technical leadership

  • Take the tech lead role on engagements when the shape of the team requires it
  • Write and review code where it matters: reference implementations, spikes, thorny pipelines, infrastructure-as-code
  • Set engineering standards for the practice - testing, CI/CD, environments, code review, observability
  • Coach and unblock engineers; raise the standard of the people around you

Practice building and pre-sales

  • Spot and qualify follow-on work inside live accounts
  • Build reusable assets: reference architectures, accelerators, delivery playbooks
  • Help define the hiring bar and interview the next data engineers and architects
  • Work with the existing cloud infrastructure and testing practices so data engagements pull them through, and vice versa

Essential Experience

  • 10+ years in data engineering and architecture, with at least 3 as the lead architect on complex, multi-team programmes
  • Designed and delivered modern data platforms end to end on AWS and/or Databricks
  • Still writes production-grade code: strong Python and SQL, Spark, dbt or equivalent, infrastructure-as-code (Terraform preferred)
  • Track record in a consultancy, systems integrator or other client-facing setting - comfortable being accountable to a paying client, not only an internal stakeholder
  • Data modelling depth across dimensional, Data Vault and lakehouse/medallion approaches, with a view on when each is most appropriate
  • Data governance in practice: catalogue, lineage, access control, quality, and Regulatory obligations
  • Owned platform cost: sizing, forecasting and bringing a runaway bill back down
  • Estimating and scoping work, and shaping proposals that were won
  • SC clearance, or eligibility for it

Desirable

  • Databricks and/or AWS certification at professional level, and experience supporting a firm 7s partner status (competency badges, certified-headcount targets, co-sell with partner account teams)
  • Streaming and event-driven architecture in production (Kafka/MSK, Kinesis, Structured Streaming)
  • Data products, mesh or federated ownership models applied on a real programme, not just in theory
  • ML and AI platform work: feature stores, MLflow, model serving, and the data foundations behind RAG or agentic use cases
  • Regulated-sector exposure - financial services, healthcare, public sector - and the assurance that comes with it

How you work

  • Opinionated but not dogmatic: recommends the simplest architecture that meets the requirement, and says so when a client 7s preferred tool is the wrong one
  • Comfortable being the only data person in the room and building the case from scratch
  • Writes clearly - decision records, options papers and diagrams a client executive can act on
  • Commercially aware: understands utilisation, margin and how a scope conversation protects both sides
  • Generous with knowledge; wants to grow a team rather than be its single point of failure
  • Happy with the ambiguity of an early-stage practice inside an established business

Company Benefits

  • You’ll have 25 days holiday per year (plus bank holidays), and you’ll start with 10 Development Days per year
  • Flexible working policy
  • You’ll get a powerful laptop computer, as well as all the accessories you need for a comfortable and ergonomic working environment
  • We provide access to a BUPA Employee Assistance Program (EAP). Scale Factory colleagues, and their families (over 16 years old) can call a helpline number at any time of day to get emotional and practical advice and support on a range of topics
  • Once you’ve passed your probation period, we provide a number of other benefits:
  • We provide (optional*) private health insurance through Vitality, which also delivers various rewards for staying active, focusing on mental health, and buying healthy foods
  • We pay into a Nest Workplace Pension Scheme on your behalf, at a higher percentage rate than the statutory minimum
  • We provide Aviva Group Life and (optional*) Critical Illness Insurance policies, to help provide some financial safety to you and your loved ones in case something goes wrong
  • We’ll review your salary annually, either in April or October, depending on your start date with us
* Health and Critical Illness insurance are optional, as they’re taxable in the UK

Principal Data Consultant at The Scale Factory
Position posted 4 days ago

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Starling Bank on cord

Starling Bank

Full Stack Engineer (ML Ops)

London, UK
FinTech · Banking · Finance
A better bank for everyone
Active
over 6 months ago
Responds to
0% of requests
Responds in
1h 55m
Requests
7 pending

Skills & Experience

Job roles: Full Stack
Experience level: Mid, Senior
Core skills considered: Java, React, Redux, AWS, JavaScript

Logistics

Base salary: £70K - £110K
Employment type: Permanent
Remote working: Hybrid (up to 2 remote days p/w)
Visa sponsorship: Not available

Job Description

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. We don't like to mandate how much you visit the office and work from home, that's to be agreed upon between you and your manager.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Requirements

We have built our entire banking platform in house and mostly in Java. We are looking for people who want to work on building the tooling that is used by our engineers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who are truly full stack, and are as comfortable polishing their javascript front end as they are debugging the innards of their java applications database interactions, or standing up infrastructure with terraform. We are looking for people who can:

  • Design REST apis.
  • Code backend services, ideally using Java, or another other server side compiled language.
  • Develop modern front ends, ideally using React and Redux.
  • Get their code into the cloud and support it there, ideally on AWS.
  • Believe in clean coding, simple solutions, automated testing and continuous deployment.
  • Like to take ownership of a feature from the original idea through to live.
  • Think (like us) that a small number of empowered developers is the right way to deliver software.

Company Benefits

  • 33 days holiday (including flexible bank holidays)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Part-time and/or flexible hours available for most roles
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary
  • Hybrid/remote working
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Varied social groups set up and run by our employees
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

Full details are available on our careers site

Interview Process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 30 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 90 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team
Alex Yeates on cord
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