Who are Benefex?
We are a fast-moving technology company, and one of the most successful providers of online reward and benefits solutions in the UK. We believe no one comes to work to do a bad job or be actively disengaged, and that technology is instrumental in providing an exceptional employee experience. We are striving to create seamless but tangible interactions between employers and employees, making work a rewarding place for every single one of us. To help us on our quest to be the best, we need brilliant people on board and that’s where you come in.

WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?

• Technical proficiencies:
• Demonstrable experience of designing and building systems and services on a cloud-native data platform (preferable on GCP) at a startup (or scaleup) in the past, and supporting the development needs of data analysts, analytics engineers, and data scientists.
• Able to execute across the data engineering lifecycle (up-to transformation at minimum), from building data platform infrastructure to data modelling (via dbt) in a cloud environment (e.g. BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks).
• Proven Python software engineering skills (e.g. an understanding of concepts such as decorators, generators, context managers, typing).
• Proven experience with SQL (e.g. parsing JSON files, complex joins, complex calculations using CTEs etc) and performance optimisation of queries.
• Ideally hands-on experience using infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g. Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation) and containerisation (e.g. Docker).
• General engineering traits that we look for:
• Taking ownership: A mindset of holding yourself and others accountable, someone who can be relied on in challenging situations, a bias to action.
• Passion for technology: Someone who invests in their craft and self learning, a continuous improvement mindset, a focus on best practices, and someone keen to see how new tools/technology can be applied to business problems.
• Open mindedness: Strong opinions loosely held, you’re open to ideas, and seek feedback and input from others.
• Excellent communicator: An effective communicator to techncial and non-technical audiences, able to break down complex information into simple to understand language.
• Natural problem solver: someone who thrives on solving technical challenges, who has a methodical way to work through problems and offer pragmatic solutions
  Even if you don’t meet all of the requirements for this role, we encourage you to apply! We are looking for talented and passionate individuals who are eager to learn and grow. We also offer a variety of other roles, so please check out our careers page to see if there is something else that might be a good fit for you.

ROLE OVERVIEW

As one of the first senior hires in Data Engineering, reporting into our Engineering Director, you will have the opportunity to lay the foundations for our data vision. We are at the start of our data journey at Benefex, and we recognise a strong foundational data platform is a key first step on that journey. Whilst we have data infrastructure on GCP in-place and used today, this is focused on one providing analytics to our customers. It’s not a data platform that has been designed with internal analytics in mind from the ground up. With the support of an interim consultant, you will help design the platform architecture then build out the platform.
Data engineers are the people who enable everyone at Benefex to produce and consume data by leveraging the capabilities of the data platform (services such as BigQuery, Airflow, dbt, Thoughtspot. Looker). They architect and implement the data platform infrastructure (e.g using Terraform, Docker), and use it to collect and protect data from across our internally owned and externally procured systems landscape, to make available for consumption. A focus on a great analytical developer experience is important as well, so they manage the tooling that makes it easy to produce and consume data products (and services) from data on the platform. Ultimately, they make it possible for Benefex to combine, enrich and consume data safely at scale so we can better achieve our company mission.