Senior Data Engineer

Are you an organised worker who would like the opportunity to develop your technical skills in a wide-reaching role?

This post sits within the National Records of Scotland (NRS) Geography team. Their remit is both varied and challenging and they are responsible for maintaining postcode boundaries for Scotland, which are the main building block for higher area geographies used to disseminate statistics. The team also produce the NRS Scottish Address Directory and maintain a list of communal establishments, managed residential accommodation, both of which feed into several government surveys. Geographic products are created and issued on a regular basis and many requests for geographic information are processed, some often requiring complex spatial analysis.

As the postholder, you will be responsible for helping maintain the postcode and address management systems as well as investigating and developing geographic products and boundaries for use in future work on population statistics. You will be required to use your specialist skills to develop GIS methodologies, carry out complex spatial analyses, test processes and systems, and provide recommendations and outputs, in a timely manner and to the required quality standards.

• Maintain internal systems, using FME, Python and GIS, required to undertake digitising tasks and for the creation of geography postcode and addressing products.
• Produce complex geospatial and geo-statistical analysis and create output files in a variety of formats e.g. shapefiles or GeoJson.
• Bring multiple data sources together in a conformed model for analysis.
• Design, build and test data products that are complex or large scale.
• Select and implement appropriate technologies from an approved portfolio to deliver scalable and future proofed data solutions.
• Investigate the use of a range of tools for storing and working with meta data.
• Respond to problems in databases, data processes, data products and services as they occur. Determine the appropriate remedy and assist with its implementation, and with preventative measures.
• Use agreed standards and tools to design, code, test, correct and document moderate-to-complex programs and scripts from agreed specifications and subsequent iterations.
• Review requirements and specifications and define test conditions, generate synthetic test data, identify issues and risks associated with this work and analyse and report test activities and results.
• You will be expected to spend a portion of your time engaging with your DDaT specialist community, for example attending community knowledge exchanges, and providing technical peer support of various kinds - whether expert consultancy advice, code review, or pair programming, as well as keeping up to date with relevant technologies, concepts, and frameworks.