MI5 is responsible for protecting the UK from threats to our National Security. Our teams work tirelessly to ensure the safety and prosperity of our country, countering threats from terrorism and espionage. Whatever your role you will contribute to our mission in keeping the country safe. We can’t tell you much about how we use technology, but we can tell you plenty about what it’s like to work with us.

Benefits
25 days annual leave (rising to 30 after 5 years’ service) and 10.5 public and privilege holidays
Pension
Interest free season ticket loan
Cycle to work scheme
Financial support for learning and development
Subsidised Gym

Who we are
Engineering is the beating heart of MI5, developing and maintaining capabilities that support all aspects of our business. We use agile methodology to deliver products that are core to MI5’s operation, working to the full spectrum of investigative, analytical and corporate areas of the organisation. Our products are built across a variety of different tech stacks, giving engineers access to a career where they can move between teams to build experience in a wide number of technologies or develop a deep specialism in their preferred area. Embracing a DevSecOps mindset, our teams run what we build. Whether it’s building a platform to enable the analysis of data, systems to track the progress of our investigations, compliance services to ensure we are operating legally or tooling to improve our developer experience, the nature of our work presents unique and fascinating engineering challenges, the likes of which you will never have seen before.

Our teams
We build products that provide capability aligned to the full range of MI5 business areas. Our multi-disciplinary product teams are made up of engineers who work alongside product owners, business analysts and agile delivery colleagues to ensure MI5 gets what it needs. The majority work in Scrum or Kanban. We have strong graduate and apprentice programmes that place our more junior staff alongside experienced engineers to support their development.

We use technologies such as Oracle, MongoDB, Elastic Search and Hadoop for data storage. On the front end we use a mix of commercial-off-the-shelf products and custom applications; mostly JavaScript focussed. We also make use of cloud technologies such as AWS and Azure.

Who you are
We are looking for Lead Data Engineers who have experience of working with a broad range of technologies, leading engineering teams and taking responsibility for making technical decisions. As a lead data engineer, you would be responsible for the design and implementation of numerous complex data flows to connect operational systems, data for analytics or business intelligence (BI) systems.

We’re interested in people who:
•    Have excellent communications skills.  Using deep understanding of data engineering, be able to listen to the needs of technical and business stakeholders and interpret them.  Using appropriate language for the audience
•    Act as a subject matter expert in data integration design, delivering complex data flows via agile methodologies in collaboration with development teams, product owners and testers.  Using knowledge of technologies such as Apache Kafka, Apache NiFi, or other leading commercial of the shelf data integration platforms
•    Are able to implement, deliver and translate a number of data models including unstructured data, document formats, relational models and formats to support geo-enabled applications and graph database structures.  Using knowledge of various formats including XML, JSON, flat file, Parquet etc.  
•    Have good knowledge of design patterns and are able to implement them appropriately
•    Are able to manage metadata across multiple systems and platforms, with a deep knowledge of tracking data provenance and data lineage
•    Will promote data innovation in their own teams, at the organisation level and across government, championing data engineering techniques
•    Will work to agreed and recognised standards to build solutions using various traditional or big data languages such as SQL (Oracle), PL/SQL (Oracle), Python, Scala, Apache Spark, Java, Javascript etc. Using various tools including Hue (Hive/Impala), Kibana (Elastic Search) or other commercial off the shelf data integration platforms and languages

What you’ll do
You’ll share our collective responsibility to keep the country safe and be keen to constantly improve yourself and your team. Our teams work closely with each other and with mission customers, so it’s important that you’re prepared to communicate and share your knowledge. As a Lead Data Engineer, you’ll be expected to:
•    Lead the development across a small number of teams or take responsibility for a particular technical specialism where you will act as a subject matter expert
•    Support decision making and risk taking within teams using your experience and technical knowledge
•    Coach and mentor junior colleagues to help develop their skills, bringing on their data engineering thinking
•    Promote best practice and help to set standards across the organisation
•    Participate in guilds and cross-organisation initiatives to build our community of engineers

Learning and development is central to our engineering ethos and we invest heavily in our staff. As part of your MI5 career we will support you in broadening and deepening your technical and non-technical skills. We have access to a wide variety of classroom and online learning, as well as our own development programmes and schemes. We work with external bodies to support and fund accreditation for our staff, which could be in a specific technical area or more broadly, such as becoming a Chartered Engineer.

Recruitment Process

You will be invited to upload your CV and complete an online application form. If successful, you will be invited to a face to face interview at MI5, which will include competency and scenario based questions. This will also explore your motivation to work for MI5. The final stage is a security interview with one of our vetting team.

You should read about the vetting process and satisfy yourself that you meet the criteria outlined in the vetting pages of the How to Apply section prior to submitting an application. Giving misleading information or omitting or concealing information during the recruitment and vetting process is viewed very seriously. You should ensure that you follow our guidance from when you apply.

Offer of Interview

As a disability confident leader, we will ensure that a fair and proportionate number of disabled applicants that meet the minimum criteria for this position will be offered an interview. To ensure an interview for this vacancy, the minimum criteria (in order of application process) are:
•    Eligibility Questions – You will be asked a series of questions relating to the role and working for this organisation. If you meet the criteria here, you will be directed to the initial application form.
•    On successful completion of the questions and an application form sift, you will be invited to interview (this could be either a telephone, video or face to face interview). This is our Offer of Interview.

Eligibility Criteria

To be eligible to apply you must be a British citizen.  One of your parents must be a British citizen or must have the nationality or citizenship from our approved list of countries. If you hold dual nationality, of which one component is known is British, you will nonetheless be considered. Candidates must normally have been resident in the UK for seven out of the last ten years. This is particularly important if you were born outside the UK.

You can apply at the age of 17 years and 6 months, if successful you will not be offered a start date prior to your 18th birthday. Discretion is vital. You should not discuss your application, other than with your partner or a close family member. Please note, you should only launch your application from within the UK. If you are based overseas, you should wait until you visit the UK to launch an application. Applying from outside the UK will impact on our ability to progress your application. Further information on our eligibility criteria can be found on the 'How to Apply' section.

Owing to the sensitivity of our work, we do not publicly disclose the identities of our staff. Discretion is vital. You should not discuss your application, other than with your partner or a close family member.

Equal Opportunities

At MI5 diversity and inclusion are critical to our mission. To protect the UK, we need a truly diverse workforce that reflects the society we serve. This includes diversity in every sense of the word: those with different backgrounds, ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, ways of thinking and those with disabilities or neurodiverse conditions. We therefore welcome and encourage applications from everyone, including those from groups that are under-represented in our workforce.