Contract Data Engineer

The Role My client is seeking an experienced Senior Data Management / Secure Data Environment Data Engineer to support the design, build, operation and improvement of secure data processing services within a healthcare data environment. The contractor will work as part of the Data Platform function, supporting the Trust’s Secure Data Environment, Data Landing Zone, SDE Repository, Primary Care processing area, pseudonymisation processes, and Bring Your Own Data pipelines. The role requires a strong blend of hands-on data engineering, secure data management, data modelling, metadata, data quality, SQL development, cloud-based (Azure very strongly preferred) data platform experience and the ability to work with sensitive health and care data. This is a delivery-focused role, suited to a contractor who can quickly understand existing processes, stabilise BAU activity, improve technical controls, and help build repeatable data engineering patterns. This will be a 3 month contract role and can be fully remote. Skills Required • SQL development and relational database design. • Azure SQL and/or PostgreSQL. • Data engineering in cloud-based environments. • Azure Synapse, Databricks, Microsoft Fabric or equivalent. • Python and/or PySpark. • DBT or similar transformation framework. • Data pipeline development and orchestration. • Prefect, Airflow, Azure Data Factory or similar orchestration tooling. • Source control using Git. • Azure DevOps or equivalent CI/CD tooling. • Cloud storage and secure data processing patterns. • Data modelling for analytics, research or population health use cases. • Metadata, lineage and data catalogue tools, ideally OpenMetadata or equivalent. • Data quality reporting, exception handling and validation frameworks. • Secure handling of sensitive or confidential data.