Data & Analytics Engineer

Food4Education is seeking a Data & Analytics Engineer to own its data platform end to end, including the pipelines and APIs that bring data from source systems into the data warehouse, and the models, tests and definitions that turn it into reliable metrics. The role ensures data arrives reliably, completely and securely, is modelled consistently, and is documented to a standard that supports multi-country expansion and technical assistance to partner organizations. The post-holder works in a two-person engineering team, collaborating closely with engineering and platform teams, source-system owners, BI analysts and business teams.

• Document and profile all data sources — relational databases, Google Sheets, APIs and unstructured data — for quality, volume, update frequency, key relationships and business entity mappings.
• Design and maintain the unified BigQuery data model, applying agreed naming and governance standards, partitioning and clustering for cost, and retention and historisation rules, designed for transfer across countries and partners.
• Build and maintain extraction, transformation and enrichment pipelines for every source system, using incremental loading to minimise processing cost, and deliver data migrations, new integrations and ingestion for new countries.
• Configure and maintain Apache Airflow or equivalent workflows with business-aligned scheduling, error handling, retries and backfills, and monitor pipeline health to resolve failures.
• Design and maintain dbt models from staging to serving layers with consistent grain, naming and conformed dimensions.
• Implement core metric definitions so every report, dashboard and external submission uses the same logic; build dbt tests across critical assets; maintain the KPI dictionary definition, logic, source, refresh cadence, as-at date, business owner; reconcile figures where systems disagree; prepare certified self-service datasets; and flag definitions that cannot be implemented as written, working with system and business owners to close gaps at source.
• Implement validation checks at extraction and loading.
• Maintain quality monitoring dashboards, data dictionaries, alerting tools, and data lineage, while logging, triaging, resolving, and documenting incidents against agreed severity levels.
• Mask or hash personal data at the ETL layer, implement row- and column-level access control across agreed tiers, ensure no model reintroduces personal data, and support access reviews and data protection requirements.
• Maintain the raw-layer data dictionary, KPI dictionary, dependencies and lineage; document pipelines, transformations, models and operational runbooks; train and support the BI team on data models and access patterns; and ensure systems can be operated and transferred without the post-holder present.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics or a related field.
• Minimum 4 years across data and analytics engineering, with production experience in both, including at least 2 years owning dbt and BigQuery in production models, tests and documentation and demonstrated delivery of data migrations.
• Strong Python and SQL.
• Advanced proficiency in BigQuery or an equivalent cloud data warehouse in production.
• Dimensional modelling: grain, conformed dimensions, slowly changing dimensions and star schema design.
• Production experience building and orchestrating data pipelines with tools such as Apache Airflow, Dagster, Cloud Composer or GitHub Actions, including scheduling, dependency management, retries and alerting.
• Change data capture, incremental loading and backfill strategies across varied source systems.
• Version control, code review and CI/CD applied to data work.
• GitHub or equivalent.
• Data protection controls and data migration procedures.
• Able to translate a business metric definition into an implementable specification, and discuss it directly with non-technical stakeholders.
• Attentive to data accuracy; documents as a matter of course and builds systems others can operate.
• Raises problems early and is comfortable reporting known issues and quality gaps.
• Communicates clearly with non-technical colleagues, system owners and vendors.
• Organized and dependable under operational pressure.
• Cloud data platform or dbt certifications are an advantage but not required.
• ERP integration experience, Sage X3 or similar.
• IoT or telematics data.
• Experience supporting month-end financial close, ensuring finance data feeds are complete, reconciled and available on schedule.
• Experience in a small team owning the full data stack.
• Data migrations and data integrations live within the expected timelines.
• New ingestions running on standard patterns rather than a bespoke build.
• Pipeline uptime above 90%, with alerts responded to within 4 hours.
• Failures caught by monitoring before a stakeholder notices.