Data Engineer

We are Home Bargains. When you visit one of our 600 stores across the UK, you’ll come out with more than you went in for and you’ll have enjoyed the experience. We’ve been selling Top Brands at Bottom Prices for nearly 50 years and today we are a family of 28,000 colleagues. More than just a discount retailer - at our heart we are a technology and innovation company. Doing things smarter, more efficiently – but also differently to our competitors - has played a large part in our success to date. Similarly, we recognise that becoming more insights driven and embracing new technologies (e.g. AI, IoT) will play a crucial role in increasing sales, reducing costs, boosting efficiency and allowing Home Bargains to remain competitive in the retail sector for years to come. To help realise these ambitions, we are on the lookout for top Data Engineering talent to join our organisation.

As a Data Engineer, you will be a valued member of our Data Science and Insights team - which sits within the wider Digital department. Our team’s mission is to harness the power of data to solve business problems and to enable our colleagues to make more informed decisions. We achieve this by translating data into actionable insights, which lead to a better understanding of our customers, colleagues and events around the business, identifying new opportunities and predicting outcomes. The team strives to promote a mature data culture and - together with the wider Digital department - seeks to maximise the benefits of technology by sharing best practises and delivering training.

Working alongside our Data Analysts/Scientists, Data Visualisation Engineers, Product Managers and other Data Engineers, you will be responsible for data model development and operations across our technology stack, ensuring that data flows consistently from our business operations to the teams that need it most. By exploiting your Python and SQL skills, you will work with colleagues to design and implement the infrastructure needed to collect, transform, clean and organise data from across the organisation. You will create the data products that sit at the heart of our data led strategy, delivering insights and underpinning our ML & AI ambition.

• 37.50 hours per week
• Remote/hybrid working or Liverpool Head Office based available
• 5.6 weeks paid holiday per year including bank and public holiday allowance rising to 6.6 weeks upon 5 years' service
• Contributable Company pension scheme

Employee benefits:

• MyHB employee benefits platform with access to:
  • Retail and leisure discounts plus hundreds more
  • Free Financial Advice
  • Bank your savings into an ISA
  • 24/7 confidential counselling and advice line
  • Low cost voluntary insured health plans
• Onsite subsidised Health and Fitness Centre
• Onsite canteen
• 10% store discount
• Access to social and sporting events
• Free car parking

Build and maintain data feeds

· As a Data Engineer, your primary responsibility is to build and maintain the data feeds that underpin the work of the Data Science and Insights team

· You will be responsible for the entire end-to-end of data provisioning, from identification and scoping through design, implementation, testing and ongoing management

· You will need to employ engineering best practices to create data feeds that are robust, scalable and efficient

Data Warehouse management

· The core of our data platform is a modern, scalable cloud data warehouse, from which we develop and deploy data products for use across the business

· You will play a leading role, alongside your IT colleagues, in the management and further development of this critical infrastructure

· In addition to the Data Warehouse itself, you will use various AWS services to deploy containerised data transformation applications and manage orchestration with Apache Airflow

Data stewardship

· The quality of our data assets is essential to their adoption and value generation. You will play a key role in ensuring data quality through the development of automated data validation and cleansing processes. Maintaining effective documentation is essential for usability of data assets. Your role will include documentation of data schemas, data lineage and transformation

Maintenance of deployed applications and reports

· Ensuring that necessary data is continually fed to deployed data science applications and reports

· Monitoring data flows, job orchestration and patches/releases as necessary

New applications and reports

· Assisting team members in provisioning data for applications and reports in development

· Optimising data processing and where appropriate, applying distributed methods

The successful candidate must have:

• Strong knowledge of data warehousing solutions, ETL/ELT processes and data quality issues
• Excellent SQL skills
• Proficiency in Python
• Experience in core software engineering practices, e.g. development lifecycle, Git version control, continuous integration etc.
• Experience with cloud computing
• Previous experience working as part of a data team
• Experience with distributed frameworks and containers

And it's a bonus if you have the following, but not essential:

• A good understanding of retail-orientated business processes and systems
• Familiarity with Snowflake/AWS/Airflow
• Previous experience working with Big data

TJ Morris Limited trading as Home Bargains is a privately owned family run discount retailer selling top brands at the lowest possible price on the UK high street.

Having started 45 years ago in Liverpool our customers continue to be at the heart of everything we do and throughout our 580 stores we have over 5 million customers each week.

With plans to increase our store portfolio to 1,000 stores throughout the UK we are a fast-paced retailer opening 50 stores a year (nearly one every weekend) - and we wouldn't have it any other way!