Data Engineer

Full time: 35 hours per week (Mondays to Fridays)  

Maternity Cover Contract – until April 2027 

Closing date for applications: 30 November 2025  

First interview: 9/10 December 2025  

Second interview: 16 December 2025 

About Us   

 
The Wildlife Trusts are a grassroots movement of people from a wide range of backgrounds and all walks of life, who believe that we need nature and nature needs us. We have more than 944,000 members, over 38,000 volunteers, 3,600 staff and 600 trustees. There are 46 individual Wildlife Trusts, each of which is a place-based independent charity with its own legal identity, formed by groups of people getting together and working with others to make a positive difference to wildlife and future generations, starting where they live and work.  

Every Wildlife Trust is part of The Wildlife Trusts federation and a corporate member of the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts, a registered charity in its own right founded in 1912 and one of the founding members of IUCN – the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Taken together this federation of 47 charities is known as The Wildlife Trusts.    

The next few years will be critical in determining what kind of world we all live in. We need to urgently reverse the loss of wildlife and put nature into recovery at scale if we are to prevent climate and ecological disaster. We recognise that this will require big, bold changes in the way The Wildlife Trusts work, not least in how we mobilise others and support them to organise within their own communities.  

About You   

As 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. You will be responsible for ensuring the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of the federation wide data service system, a data lakehouse, providing key insights and solutions to support decision-making across the organisation and federation, responding to the needs of Wildlife Trusts and the delivery of our 2030 Strategy.  

Working collaboratively with various teams, you will develop data management solutions, 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 of Wildlife Trusts.  

As Data Engineer, you will be responsible for managing and optimising data pipelines, cloud services, and providing data-driven solutions to support business needs. To excel in this role, you should be highly motivated, detail-oriented, and passionate about people focused data engineering and analysis. You will have experience in a data engineering role, ideally with practical experience or the ability to upskill in cloud services like Azure, Databricks and ESRI, as well as excellent proven proficiency, SQL and Python. Ideally you would have a familiarity with developing pipelines which support Analysts who use RStudio Power BI and/or GIS. You will have experience or the ability to up-skill in administering data services linked to the Data Lakehouse wholistically, such as GitHub, Power BI.  

You will work closely with and on behalf of teams across the Wildlife Trusts to ensure our data systems are secure, optimised, scalable, and cost-efficient. You should have a solid understanding of data security to ensure compliance with best practices. Excellent communication skills and the ability to work collaboratively with cross-functional teams are essential.  

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 to become our Data Solutions Engineer. 

The Wildlife Trusts value passion, respect, trust, integrity, pragmatic activism and strength in diversity. Whilst we are passionate in promoting our aims, we are not judgmental and are inclusive. We particularly 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.  

The Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and adults at risk. For applicable roles, applicants must be willing to undergo checks with past employers and Disclosure and Barring Service checks at the eligible level. RSWT take our Safeguarding responsibilities extremely seriously. Please click here to 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 utilising AI tools. 

If you require a reasonable adjustment or other assistance to participate in the recruitment process, for example due to disability, please contact us.