Data Engineer

Salary: up to £35,000 Location: Home‑based with occasional travel to the Newark office / UK Employment type: Full time (35 hours per week, Monday to Friday) Contract: Maternity Cover until April 2027 Closing date: 30 November 2025

About the Wildlife Trusts: The Wildlife Trusts are a grassroots movement dedicated to protecting nature and the future generations. With 944,000 members, 38,000 volunteers, 3,600 staff and 600 trustees across 46 individual Trusts, our mission is to reverse wildlife loss and put nature into recovery at scale.

As a Data Engineer you will play a crucial role in supporting the work of the Wildlife Trusts by maintaining and enhancing our data pipelines and infrastructure, ensuring the effectiveness, efficiency and scalability of the federation‑wide data service system and data lakehouse. You will be responsible for providing key insights and solutions to support decision‑making across the organisation and federation, and for responding to the needs of Wildlife Trusts and the delivery of our 2030 Strategy.

You will work collaboratively with various teams, develop data management solutions, design new use cases, forecast data volumes, and ensure cost‑effective service maintenance. You will be integral in enabling us to leverage data for operational and strategic success and in supporting an excellent community of practice within the federation.

You will manage and optimise data pipelines, cloud services, and provide data‑driven solutions. You should be highly motivated, detail‑oriented, and passionate about people‑focused data engineering and analysis. You are expected to have experience in a data engineering role, ideally with practical experience or the ability to up‑skill in cloud services such as Azure, Databricks and ESRI, as well as proven proficiency in SQL and Python. Familiarity with pipelines supporting analysts using RStudio, Power BI and GIS is desirable, and experience with administering data services linked to the Data Lakehouse (GitHub, Power BI) is a plus. A solid understanding of data security and compliance is essential. Excellent communication skills and the ability to work collaboratively with cross‑functional teams are also required.

If you are a problem solver with a can‑do attitude and a passion for data, we encourage you to apply for this exciting opportunity as our Data Solutions Engineer.

The Wildlife Trusts value passion, respect, trust, integrity, pragmatic activism and strength in diversity. We encourage applications from people who are underrepresented within our sector, including people from minority backgrounds and people with disabilities. We are committed to creating a movement that recognises and truly values individual differences and identities.

For applicable roles, applicants must be willing to undergo safeguarding checks with past employers and Disclosure and Barring Service checks at the eligible level. The Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts (RSWT) takes safeguarding responsibilities extremely seriously. Please read our commitment statement.

As a Disability Confident employer, we are committed to offering an interview to anyone with a disability that meets all the essential criteria for the post. Please let us know if you require any adjustments to make our recruitment process more accessible.

RSWT are committed to increasing the diversity of its staff through its Levelling the Field recruitment pledge and will put any ethnic minority applicants that meet all the essential criteria for the post through to the next stage of recruitment.

Please do not use artificial intelligence tools to assist you to complete the application form. We may not accept applications that have been completed using AI tools.