Senior Data Platform Engineer

About Us

We are a world-class visitor attraction and leading science research centre. We use the Museum's unique collections and our unrivalled expertise to tackle the biggest challenges facing the world today. We care for more than 80 million objects spanning billions of years and welcome more than five million visitors annually and 16 million visits to our website.  

Today the Museum is more relevant and influential than ever. By attracting people from a range of backgrounds to work for us, we can continue to look at the world with fresh eyes and find new ways of doing things.

We employ 1100 staff in a variety of roles, all united by our vision of a future where people and planet thrive. We need everyone to have the passion and drive to help us with our mission to create advocates for our planet and inspire millions to care about the natural world.

Diversity and inclusion matter to us.

Our vision is of a future where both people and the planet thrive. Diversity is one of our core values and we strive to build a workplace where everyone feels a sense of belonging. All new staff who join us learn about the importance of diversity and inclusion to the Museum and how to contribute to creating an inclusive environment.

We know we have more to do, but we are committed to ensuring that everyone who works at the Museum feels they can thrive and feel valued and respected.

About the role

We are looking for an experienced Senior Data Platform Engineer to join a collaborative, cross-disciplinary team delivering the Museum’s flagship biodiversity data platform, the Data Ecosystem. The Data Ecosystem is the Museum’s strategic collaboration with AWS, bringing together biodiversity data from sources including acoustic sensors, camera traps, ecological surveys and community science programmes. The platform enables scientists, researchers and conservation practitioners to manage, enrich and analyse connected datasets at scale.

You’ll play a leading role in delivering key roadmap initiatives, including onboarding new data sources, evolving core platform architecture, applying AI to data verification workflows, and improving data governance and user capabilities. You’ll lead the design and delivery of data engineering solutions within a cross-functional agile team, working closely with Product, Engineering and Science teams to translate user needs into technical solutions and working iteratively to deliver value.

In this role, you’ll build and maintain scalable data pipelines for biodiversity and environmental data sources, and design and evolve data models and services to improve data quality, governance, usability and scalability. You’ll deliver robust, scalable services using AWS and modern cloud engineering practices, deploying and managing cloud infrastructure with DevOps best practices. You’ll also support platform modernisation and cloud migration initiatives, and monitor, maintain and continuously improve platform performance and reliability.

This is an exciting opportunity to help build a world-class environmental data platform while working alongside scientists, researchers and technology specialists to support nature recovery across the UK.

The Museum supports a hybrid work model, combining work-from-home with on-site activities each week, as arranged by each functional team.

Please note, this is a fixed term contract until 31 March 2028.

About you

You have senior-level experience delivering complex data engineering or platform engineering solutions, and you’re comfortable working in a product-focused, collaborative environment alongside Product Managers and stakeholders.

You have strong experience building cloud-based data platforms, preferably within AWS, and strong software engineering skills in Python, Java or similar languages. You’ve designed and operated ETL/ELT pipelines and integrated data from multiple sources, and you have a solid understanding of data modelling, data quality, metadata and data governance. You also have experience using Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, and you’re comfortable with modern DevOps practices, including containerisation and CI/CD.

While not essential, it would be great if you also have experience delivering AI or machine learning-enabled solutions, or working with scientific, environmental or biodiversity data. An interest in biodiversity, conservation or natural science would also be welcome.

Thriving at the Museum: the way we work

We are proud to work at the Museum and have identified the qualities we all need to embody to reach our shared ambition. This sits alongside the Museum’s values and forms the framework for the way we work.

Find out more here

What we offer

• 27.5 days holiday plus 8 bank holidays (full time equivalent)
• Generous defined contribution Natural History Museum Pension Scheme (employer contribution 4 - 10%)
• Season ticket, bicycle and rental loan
• Life insurance
• Free admission to our exhibitions and many other paid exhibitions at museums, galleries and institutions across London and the UK.
• Staff discount at our Museum shops and cafes
• We offer a wide variety of training initiatives and opportunities to build skills. Investing in staff development is important to us, and we are ambitious about helping staff to grow and fulfil their potential.
• Affordable membership to the Civil Service Sports Council which offers a range of benefits including an extensive list of special offers and reduced entry fees at a selection of cinema chains, theme parks, theatres, retailers and supermarkets. It also provides entry to up to 300 English Heritage sites and other national treasures. For more details, visit https://www.cssc.co.uk
• Membership to our Sports and Social Association (for a small fee), which includes access to our in-house gym and clubs such as football, softball, table tennis and tennis and classes in Middle Eastern dance, yoga and Tai Chi

Hybrid working

We are working towards a vision where both people and planet thrive, and nothing gives a greater connection with this, than seeing first-hand, the visitors, scientific research and collections that all of our work is inspired by and working side by side with the teams delivering the visitor experience and events.  We also recognise the benefits and flexibility that hybrid working brings. We operate a hybrid working model that requires regular, weekly attendance for this role, with the precise pattern of days on site and worked from home to be agreed with your manager.