Cloud Data Platform Engineer

We’re First Central Insurance & Technology Group (First Central for short), an innovative, market-leading insurance company. We protect the things customers love so they can get on with what matters to them in life. 

Data drives us. It fuels our outstanding distribution, finance, technology and legal services. Our underwriting skills are built on data expertise; it creates the insights we need to give the right cover to the right customers at the right price. But, it’s the people inside and outside our business that power us. They make us stand out, help us succeed. We’re ambitious. We’re growing. We’ve won awards.   

At First Central we’re on a mission to enrich every experience with data ingenuity and we’re looking for a talented Cloud Platform Engineer to join our data engineering practice in this brand-new role. 

We’ve been investing heavily in our Azure hosted data platform for a number of years, utilising technologies such as Azure Synapse, Data Factory, Function apps and many more to build out an enterprise grade data platform.  In 2024 we’re going even further, adopting Databricks in our data engineering practice as we build out a whole new set of infrastructure and services to create a data science and ml ops platform that will continually grow and evolve. Thanks to this continued investment we have created this brand-new role to help manage our growing platform; this new role of Cloud Platform Engineer is dedicated to provisioning, maintaining and enhancement of the data platform estate and we’re looking forward to finding the right person to join our growing team.

We're big on working flexibly - you'll spend most of your time working from home, with a couple of days a month in the office.  But of course, it’s your choice - if you prefer to be in the office more - that's good with us too.  We've offices located in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, Salford Quays, Manchester and Guernsey it’s your choice - or maybe you live further afield, we will accept applications for remote workers! 

We’d love to have you on the team if:-

• You want to play an active role in an engaged and proactive team.
• You want to role model behaviour's, share your expertise and knowledge with others.
• You like to own issues and find solutions to complex problems.
• You’re a self-starter, able to work with your own initiative and come up with plans and approaches.
• You understand how to balance delivering business value with appropriate controls and governance.

Love Data? It’s a match!

Job purpose:

As our Cloud Platform Engineer for Data, you’ll be in a highly technical role, leading the development, enhancement, and innovation of our Microsoft Azure Data Platform for Data & Analytics.  You’ll play a leading role in how our platform evolves and be pivotal in data related projects as we develop our Azure Data Platform, implement complex solutions, and deliver increasingly valuable and performant technical solutions to our customers.

While the role is necessarily technical in its nature, you’ll have strong communication skills that you’ll use to helping guide our team and your work with key stakeholders to ensure we are optimising our investment in our Azure Data Platform and creating both innovative and reliable data solutions. Whilst not having any people management responsibilities directly, the role holder will provide support, coaching and mentoring to peers such as our various data engineer roles and colleagues across technology to help develop and grow their knowledge and understanding of Azure Data Technologies.  

What's involved:

• Lead the development of new data & analytics capabilities in our Azure Data Platform by engaging with Data Architecture and Principal Data engineers and contributing to high level solution designs.
• Provide technical leadership and implementation support for our new Data Science and ML Ops platform within our Azure Data ecosystem.
• Communicate effectively with the data team, peers and key stakeholders to ensure the potential of the Azure Data Platform is understood and the importance of good practice instilled in every interaction.
• Manage and maintain the infrastructure, connectivity, and security of our Azure Data Platform meeting our requirement to create intelligence from data while protecting our customer and commercial data.
• Responsible for co-authoring the low-level design of data solutions, taking high level solution architecture artefacts, and translating them into workable designs and work packages.
• Responsible for creating and testing IaC (Infrastructure as Code) using Bicep, and Terraform for specific use-cases, to deliver projects maintaining deadlines in accordance with our release processes.
• Create a Data Platform Services Roadmap to document and th