Cloud Engineer

Description CONTRACTOR MUST BE ELIGIBLE FOR BPSS Role Title: AWS Engineer (Contract) Location: Glasgow Rate: 350 £/day through umbrella Duration: 31/12/2026 Days on site: 2-3 Role Description: We are seeking a highly skilled Senior AWS Data Engineer with strong hands-on experience building scalable, secure, and automated data platforms on AWS. The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in AWS CloudFormation, data ingestion and transformation services, Python-based ETL development, and orchestration workflows. This role will focus on designing, implementing, and optimizing end to end data pipelines, ensuring data quality, reliability, and governance across cloud-native environments. Key Responsibilities Data Engineering & Pipeline Development • Design, develop, and maintain large scale data pipelines using AWS services such as Glue, Lambda, Step Functions, EMR, DynamoDB, S3, Athena, and other ETL/ELT components. • Build automated ingestion, transformation, and enrichment workflows for structured and unstructured datasets. • Implement reusable data engineering frameworks and modular components using Python, PySpark, and AWS-native tooling. Cloud Infrastructure for Data Platforms • Develop and manage AWS CloudFormation templates for provisioning secure, scalable data engineering infrastructure. • Optimize data storage strategies (S3 layouts, partitioning, compression, lifecycle rules). • Configure and maintain compute services for data workloads (Lambda, ECS, EC2, EMR). Automation & Orchestration • Build and enhance orchestration flows using AWS Step Functions, EventBridge, and Glue Workflows. • Implement CI/CD practices for data pipelines and infrastructure automation. Security, Governance & Best Practices • Apply strong authentication/authorization mechanisms using IAM, KMS, access policies, and data access controls. • Ensure compliance with enterprise security standards, encryption requirements, and governance frameworks. • Implement data quality checks, schema validation, lineage tracking, and metadata management. Collaboration & Troubleshooting • Work with data architects, platform engineers, analysts, and cross functional stakeholders to deliver high quality datasets. • Troubleshoot pipeline issues, optimize performance, and improve reliability and observability across the data platform. • Drive continuous improvement in automation, monitoring, and operational efficiency. Required Skills & Experience • 8+ years of hands-on experience as a Data Engineer with strong AWS expertise. • Expert-level proficiency in AWS CloudFormation (mandatory). • Strong experience with AWS data and compute services: o Glue, Lambda, Step Functions, EMR o S3, DynamoDB, Athena o ECS/EC2 for data workloads where relevant • Solid experience building ETL/ELT pipelines using Python (and ideally PySpark). • Strong knowledge of IAM, KMS, encryption, and AWS security fundamentals. • Ability to design and implement authentication/authorization patterns (OAuth2, API security, IAM roles & policies). • Strong understanding of distributed systems, data modelling, modern data architectures, and cloud-native design. • Experience deploying pipelines using CI/CD practices and automated workflows.