Graduate Data Engineering Consultant

The Data School is how most of us joined The Information Lab. Over the past decade, it has launched hundreds of analytics careers across the UK, the US and Germany. For the last eighteen months we have been building our data engineering practice, and it has grown faster than we can staff it, so we are opening a data and analytics engineering stream with its own curriculum, its own coaches and its own cohort.

You get paid to learn. Four months of full-time training in our London office with your cohort, then engineering work with clients like Virgin Media O2, Barclays and Pret A Manger for the rest of your contract.

The training period

On joining The Data School, you will spend 4 months of training in the classroom with your cohort and a coach who is there every day. SQL in depth, Python, APIs, pipelines and data modelling, then Snowflake, Databricks, dbt, AWS and the practices that keep a data platform running. Consulting runs through all of it, and most of our consultants pick up one or two certifications along the way. There is more about the curriculum and our coaches across the rest of the site.

After training

You move into client-facing work (all arranged by us), usually inside a team of data engineers at the client with one or more of our people alongside you. You will build and maintain transformation layers, curate the data sources analysts and BI teams depend on, and make what already exists more reliable.

Engineering engagements tend to run long, so expect to get to know a small number of clients well.

Most people finish their contract and move into data engineering roles elsewhere. We help you get there, and we stay in touch through our alumni programme.

What are we looking for?

We want to see you build something, and then walk us through it. Everyone who applies builds a new project for us, using SQL, Python or R, or even a shell script. What to build is set out under How to apply.

We want to see how you solve problems. Most of the work in this field comes down to fixing problems that have already happened, or anticipating and solving for the ones that have not happened yet. We look for elegance and efficiency in the solution too.

After that, we look for the things four months cannot teach: curiosity, the patience to work out what a messy dataset is telling you, the confidence to explain something technical to someone who is not, openness to feedback, and the instinct to ask a question when a brief turns up half-finished.

What you do not need

While we do need you to be technical, you do not need a computer science degree, or any degree at all. You do not need to have worked as an engineer before. You do not need to have heard of Snowflake, dbt, AWS or Databricks, because we teach all of it from scratch.

You do not need a portfolio or a GitHub history behind you (although we’d love you to show yours off to us if you do have one). Everyone who applies builds something new for us, and that is what we look at.

We hire from every academic background, and a lot of our team changed careers to get here. Plenty of people work with data to a high standard without ever calling themselves engineers, and we would love to hear from you.

What’s in it for you?

• £35,000 starting salary, rising to £40,000 in your final year
• Hands-on experience with some of the UK’s most recognisable blue-chip companies
• World-class training and mentorship from some of the greatest experts across the world
• Development of both technical and consulting skills
• The opportunity to work within a supportive and inclusive culture, based in Central London

Please note: The next available Data School cohort begins 1st February 2027.