Head of Data Engineering

About us

At National Grid, we keep the lights on and homes warm.  But it’s so much more than that.  We keep people connected and society moving.  This is no easy feat, and it takes all of us.  But National Grid supplies us with the environment to make it happen.  As we generate momentum in the energy transition for all, we don’t plan on leaving any of our customers in the dark.  So, join us and help bring energy to life.

 

Job Purpose

Head of Data Engineering role will be part of the Chief Data Office function and reports into our Chief Data officer and managing team of Data engineers. It is a critical role to deliver on National Grid vision which is "To be at the heart of a clean, fair and affordable energy future". He / she will be working as part of a multi-disciplinary team of data and analytics leaders, and fellow data engineers to develop and manage data products that can empower our business to make decisions from data to drive growth activities and bring efficiencies to our data processes and data maturity.

 

He / She will play a pivotal role in operationalizing the most-urgent data and analytics initiatives for Nationalgrid digital business initiatives. The bulk of the activities would be in building, managing and optimizing data pipelines and then moving these data pipelines effectively into production for key business domains, and enterprise initiatives.

Key Accountabilities

•    Guarantee compliance with data governance and data security requirements while creating, improving, and operationalizing these integrated and reusable data pipelines & data products. This would enable faster data access, integrated data reuse and vastly improved time-to-solution for Nationalgrid data and analytics initiatives.

•    This role will require both creative and collaborative working with IT and the wider business. It will involve evangelizing effective data management practices and promoting better understanding of data and analytics. The position will also be tasked with working with key business stakeholders, IT experts and subject-matter experts to plan and deliver optimal analytics and data science solutions

•    When moving the data, ensure an appropriate level of data quality is managed. Liaise with stakeholders in building trust in the data being used for decision making. Focus on validation, reconciliation, and automated testing applied end to end.

•    Promote data governance activities to exercise of authority and control of the data. In large scale data pipelines, the need for data governance goes from being a nice-to-have, to be a critical success factor. 

•    Work with Platform engineering teams to drive automation through effective metadata management leveraging well supported Data platforms managed by Platform engineering, He / She will be responsible for using innovative and modern tools, techniques, and architectures to automate the most-common, repeatable, and tedious data preparation and integration tasks partially or completely in order to minimize manual and error-prone processes and improve productivity. 

•    Works closely with Platform engineering to assist with renovating the data management infrastructure to drive automation in data integration and management.

•    Effectively promote data products approach within the enterprise. Support and deliver product centric approach within the enterprise driving innovation at scale.

•    Prepare architectural patterns, guardrails, and best practices related to Data engineering. Consult about current / future industry trends and technology needs.

•    Ensure alignment with Enterprise strategies, aligning the technologies and best practices with those of the enterprise as a whole and clearly document the implications of trade-offs being met

•    Ensures that all business units work with data engineering resource to meet their business outcomes by understanding their objectives and formulating demand plans then allocating resources appropriately. 

 

Supervisory/Interpersonal- Experience Required

•    Strong experience building, managing and working with cross-functional teams in a dynamic business environment.
•    Required to be highly creative and collaborative. An ideal candidate would be expected to collaborate with both the business and IT teams to define the business problem, refine the requirements, and design and develop data deliverables accordingly. The successful candidate will also be required to have regular discussions with data consumers on optimally refining the data pipelines developed in non-production environments and deploying them in production.
•    Required to have the accessibility and ability to interface with, and gain the respect of, stakeholders at all levels and roles within the company.
•    Is a confident, energetic self-starter, with s