Data Engineer

FutureLearn operates a Remote First working practice. A hybrid approach where home is likely to be where you'll spend most of your working time, but you will need to attend our London offices for relevant meetings, engage with and support colleagues.

For over 15 million learners, FutureLearn is the gateway to high-quality lifelong learning – something we’re truly passionate about in our mission to transform access to education. Partnering with over 260 international educational institutions and businesses, we up-skill learners and fire up their creativity, interest – and, of course, their CVs! – with our online courses. We’re building a connected, collaborative, global community where learning is available for all. We’re on the cusp of emerging from a plucky EdTech start-up into a truly transformational business, with meaty goals for the next five years. You could help us achieve those goals, working in a dynamic environment and with a truly passionate team.

What is the opportunity?

Data Engineers at FutureLearn work in the Data Platform Team, collaborating with data scientists, software engineers and analysts across the company.

The Data Platform Team builds and maintains tooling and infrastructure that supports decision making processes across the business and enables product improvements by providing a complete and consistent view of our business data.

Our technology stack

Our tech stack consists of an ETL process written in Ruby and managed by Airflow which sources data from our production database (MySQL), our email provider (Sendgrid), application logs, and other operational data sources. We transform this data and store it in PostgreSQL, structuring the schema according to Kimball dimensional modelling principles. We maintain a recommendations engine written in Python, and are in the process of integrating Snowflake into our stack with the goal of enabling new analytics possibilities.

What does success look like?

As a Data Engineer at FutureLearn you will:

• Manage, monitor and improve our existing ETL process and data warehouse design
• Collaborate with other teams to help them make effective use of data to drive decisions
• Implement, deploy and improve machine learning models as services in collaboration with data scientists, and find new and better ways to process our growing volumes of data
• Give your input and ideas to help make decisions and shape features via planning, story mapping and other product development activities

We're looking for software engineers who are comfortable writing clean, performant, and readable SQL, and who can write robust, well-factored code in Ruby.

You should have previous experience of the following:

• Building, supporting and deploying a data warehouse and ETL pipeline, taking into account performance, security and maintainability
• Writing maintainable, well-tested code in a general purpose programming language. We primarily use Ruby and Python, but we are happy to consider applicants whose experience is in other programming languages

Above all, we are looking for people who are curious, think critically, are eager to learn and keen to use their experience to help and support others. You will need to be able to communicate and explain things clearly and work well in a collaborative environment.

What we will offer you?

• 28 days of Annual Leave plus UK Public Holidays
• Roll over up to 5 days Holiday
• Buy and Sell up to 5 days Holiday
• Westfield Health Cash Plan
• Personal ‘recharge’ days, no questions asked
• Cycle to Work scheme
• Season Ticket Loan
• Charity work – 1 day dedicated to a charity of your choice
• Calm Premium Subscription

What happens next?

Ready to go for it? Click 'Apply', include your CV and a cover letter telling us why you'd like to become a FutureLearner, and how you’ll nail this role.

Recruitment Process

Please contact jobs@futurelearn.com if you require any reasonable adjustments or alterations to be made to support you through the recruitment process.

Diversity Statement

We value all the great benefits that diversity brings and encourage everyone to bring their whole self to work – At FutureLearn we are proud to have Diversity and Inclusion at the centre of everything we do. We are committed to Equal Employment Opportunity regardless of race, colour, national origin, ethnicity, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or religion.

We can't wait to meet you! #FutureLearnCareers