Lead Data Engineer - Sensitive Financial Intelligence 6-month Fixed Term Contract until April 2025

Salary: London ranging from £73,100 to £90,000 per annum – salary offered will be based on skills and experience

Are you interested in joining a team that will help combat economic crime?

The team/department

We are recruiting for a temporary Technical Specialist Data Engineer to join the FCA’s Specialist Intelligence Department to drive the engineering and pipeline solutions that will integrate a new economic crime bulk data set as part of our existing Data Exploitation and Enforcement Data Science Unit infrastructure and capabilities.

The Specialist Intelligence Department delivers insight from intelligence to support departments right across the FCA in delivering on the organisation’s statutory objectives and public commitments. Harnessing intelligence to combat economic crime and to help drive both criminal and regulatory outcomes is at the core of the department’s function – the department contributes the intelligence picture to investigations into regulatory breaches, insider dealing and investment fraud; assesses listings, firm and approved person applications, and acts as the gateway into the FCA for whistle-blowers to report misconduct and crime. 

This role will sit within our Data Exploitation Team - the department’s team focussed driving the detection of economic crime and the enabling structures through applying advanced analytics, data science, and data-led problem solving to a range of sensitive and non-sensitive intelligence data sets.

What you will be doing (the role)  

• Leading the data engineering solutions to build and scale the systems and processes for the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) capability relating to a new data set to maximise its utility

• Designing and building data pipeline solutions to help integrate our newly acquired dataset with FCA data from multiple other sources and storage solutions and a to help us identify data points that are highly relevant and require intelligence development

• Implementing data storage / database architecture that allows us to effectively integrate to our other datasets

• Integrating our new data set with other Data Exploitation projects and models to allow effectively embedded to existing and future machine learning models

• Working alongside the Enforcement Data Science Technical Specialist to agree engineering solutions to support data scientists on the development and scaling of functional tools such as networking capabilities

• Working with Enterprise Architecture, Data Architecture and both Infrastructure and Product Engineers to define solutions for the overarching technical direction

• Acting as a role model and advocate for intelligence both within the FCA and across the wider economic crime system on how we can work together with stakeholders to maximise data exploitation

What will you get from the role?

• Play a key role in influencing the design and building the foundations of a new intelligence capability delivering a step-change in the FCA’s detection, prevention, and impact against economic crime threats in in support of the FCA’s financial crime public commitment

• Work closely with subject matter experts in the Specialist Intelligence Department to maximise the value of our use of data on financial crime issues identified

• Collaborate with data scientists in Enforcement and Financial Crime DSU to bring the best analytical ideas into enhancing our methods and capabilities.

• Be part of an innovative multi-disciplinary team that brings together skills from across law enforcement intelligence and data analysis / science to conduct truly data-led intelligence analysis

Our competitive flexible benefits scheme gives you the opportunity to create a personalised benefits package, tailored to suit your lifecycle. You can use this allowance to purchase additional benefits such as dental or cycle to work or you have the option top up your base salary by taking this as cash.

Core benefits that you will receive as standard are: 

• 28 days holiday per year plus bank holidays (dependent on current grade)

• Private healthcare with Bupa 

• A non-contributory Pension of at least 8% of basic salary each month (there are several contribution levels that increase depending on your age – up to 12% a month once you reach age 35) 

• Life assurance of eight times your basic salary 

• Income protection 

We support hybrid working which means you will be able to work from home up to 60% of the time over a month with the remainder of your time in our London office.

The skills and experience you’ll have

We are a signatory to the Government’s Disability Confident scheme. This means that we will offer an interview to disabled candidates entering under the scheme, who best meet the minimum criteria for a role. 

Minimum

• Significant applied technical experience in key data engineering domains such as data processing, data pipelines or database implementation

• Demonstratable experience in the principles of distributed computing and/or distributed databases

• Experience in Python development

Essential

• Experience developing and managing data processing and preparation methods working in collaboration with Data Scientists to understand requirements and inform approach

• Experience of management of varied and at times challenging stakeholders

• Experience designing, delivering, and maintaining robust and scalable data pipelines enabling efficient data flows between multiple sources and storage solutions and analytics platforms

• Experience in implementing database design using AWS managed services such as Amazon Redshift or RDS

• Extensive hands-on experience supporting Data Scientists in the building, testing and deployment of machine learning models and web applications (e.g., Streamlit) into development and production environments

• Knowledge/experience of recent development or scaling of Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Large Language Model (LLM) techniques

• Experience designing and implementing extensible and scalable data engineering solutions that will enable future integration of other relevant datasets

• Experience working in an evolving environment where a combination of short-term tactical solutions as well as longer-term strategic solutions are required 

About the FCA 

The FCA regulates the conduct of 50,000 firms in the UK to ensure our financial markets are honest, fair and competitive. We do this to make sure markets work well for individuals, businesses and the economy as a whole. For more information on what we do, our three-year strategy can be found here. 

The FCA's Values & Diversity 

Our ambition is to cultivate a culture of inclusion for all employees that respects their individual strengths, views, and experiences. We believe that our differences and similarities enable us to be a better organisation – one that makes better decisions, drives innovation, and delivers better regulation.

The FCA is committed to achieving greater diversity across all levels of the organisations. Given this, we particularly welcome applications from women, disabled and minority ethnic candidates for our Technical Specialist role.

Flexible working

We welcome applications from candidates who are looking for flexible arrangements. Many of our staff work flexibly including working part-time, staggered hours, and job shares. We can’t promise to give you exactly what you want but we won’t judge you for asking.

Useful information

Applications for this role close at 23.59 on 19th November 2024

This role is graded as Technical Specialist - Regulatory

The role is a fixed term contract until April 2025

The role is based in London and office attendance of at least 40% is required