Data Engineer

Contract Data Engineer – Central London – Outside IR35 – Up to £600/day We’re partnering with a major energy trading player that’s in the middle of a multi-year digital transformation. They’re rebuilding their data stack from the ground up and need a sharp contract Data Engineer who can get hands-on fast and push things forward without hand-holding. Three days a week on site in Central London. You’ll be dropped straight into Stage One of a large Digitalisation Program, working in a team that’s building next-gen data infrastructure, pipelines, and AI/ML enablement tooling. If you’re the type who wants to shape real industrial systems rather than churn out toy projects, this is the right environment. What you’ll be doing • Building, testing, and maintaining data pipelines across ETL and ELT workloads. • Helping users navigate the big data platform, ingest new data, and debug issues. • Tackling complex integration challenges across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured sources. • Pre-processing, cleansing, and delivering high-quality data for advanced analytics and modelling. • Working closely with data scientists to help scale ML and AI models. • Developing BI dashboards and optimising pipelines and frameworks for performance. • Owning requirements, design, build, and maintenance of end-to-end data solutions. • Using CI/CD tooling like Azure DevOps or Jenkins and following solid engineering practices. What you need to bring • Strong hands-on experience with Python (including Pandas) and PySpark or similar distributed frameworks. • Confident SQL across TSQL, ANSI SQL, Spark SQL. • Real experience with cloud data services (Azure Data Factory, Databricks, Synapse, or equivalents on AWS/GCP). • Ability to dive deep into datasets, understand structure, and communicate insights clearly. • Experience working with structured and unstructured data at scale. • Bonus points for data lakes, open-source data tooling, data warehousing, hybrid cloud, or experience in commodities/trading. Contract details • Outside IR35 • Up to £600/day • 2-33 days a week onsite in Central London • Start ASAP If you want to work on a genuinely forward-looking data program with real commercial impact, this is worth your time.