This role provides a unique opportunity to support England Teams in their pursuit of success at major tournaments. This will be achieved by building robust data pipelines, managing efficient data storage solutions, as well as integrating and transforming data from various sources to drive the England Teams forward.
Your mission will be to deliver the highest quality data to coaches, analysts, and other key stakeholders, serving as the primary source for reports and data in our application platform used by our elite sports teams. By developing and managing a modern cloud-based tech stack, you will ensure efficient data delivery and monitor the health of data pipelines, creating a single point of truth for all staff members. Your contributions will be utilised to make critical decisions within a high-performance environment, with the data you manage being used for key functions such as (but in no way limited to) team selection, in-game modelling and in-depth performance analysis.
You will be based in the Performance Technology team, within Digital Technology at The FA. In Performance Technology, one of the key solutions served by data is our internal platform. The platform provides high quality resources enabling England Teams to be successful on the global stage. You have a chance to enhance our technical abilities through innovation, leveraging your expertise in data engineering to drive the design, development, and implementation of cutting-edge data solutions that will enable us to make data-driven decisions and achieve our strategic goals.
Interviews are currently scheduled to be held on 28th August at the National Football Centre, St. George's Park.
What will you be doing?
- Work alongside our Senior Data Architect to manage datasets, taking a comprehensive approach to understanding and documenting data flows. Ensure data integrity and apply a quality assurance approach to all data-related tasks.
- Design, develop, and maintain efficient data pipelines to serve applications and staff.
- Collaborate closely with Product Managers, Data Architects, Solution Architects, Developers and Analysts to create production processes.
- Establish and maintain quality checks to ensure the accuracy and reliability of data.
- Create excellent engineering solutions in a modern cloud tech stack.
- Integrate pipelines with observability platform/s to quickly highlight problems and pipeline health.
- Collaborate with the Senior Data Architect and Performance Technology Team to identify and resolve data and reporting issues promptly, always ensuring data accuracy, freshness, and reliability.
- Maintain clear and organised documentation of data-related processes, procedures, and workflows, ensuring that they are accessible to relevant team members.
- Be responsible for and populate the data catalogue.
- Adhere to data security and privacy policies and procedures to safeguard sensitive information.
- Work collaboratively with cross-functional teams to leverage data as a strategic asset in achieving organizational goals and objectives.
- Have the passion and desire to help push England Teams data capabilities by introducing new products, process and practice.
- Stay updated on industry best practices and emerging technologies related to data management, analysis, and reporting. Proactively seek opportunities to enhance processes and tools to improve data-related outcomes.
- Executes additional tasks as required in order to meet FA Group changing priorities.
- Comply with all company policies and procedures to ensure the highest standards of health, safety and wellbeing can be maintained.
- As part of The FA's commitment to ensuring a safe environment for everyone in football, every employee will be required to complete a DBS check. The level of the check required will be based on the activity of the specific job role and in line with legislation and government guidance.
What are we looking for?
Essential for the role:
- Bachelor's Degree or higher in a relevant discipline or equivalent industry experience.
- Proven track record of improving practices and delivering high quality solutions.
- Experience with orchestration tools to manage and automate sophisticated workflows.
- Experience managing large complex datasets.
- Experience in designing and implementing cloud-based architectures.
- Skilled in managing, ingesting, and storing large and varied datasets with a focus on optimising data quality, accessibility, and security.
- Proficiency in data integration and ETL processes.
- Familiarity with data governance, data security and compliance best practice.
- Familiarity with observability principles.
Beneficial to have:
- Experience working with sports performance data.
- Experience with GCP cloud services.
- Programming skills (Python, SQL, JS, Go or similar languages).
- Experience with Data Orchestration tools like Apache Airflow, GCP Workflows.
- Experience with different database architectures like Lakehouse, Relational, and Document Store.
- Experience of implementing observability tools.
- Strong problem-solving skills for troubleshooting data issues.
- Experience of working in an agile environment.
- Expertise in data modelling, database design and pipeline construction.
- Good project management skills.
What's in it for you?
We are committed to ensuring everyone can flourish in their roles, to achieve this we have unique office spaces under the arch of the iconic Wembley National Stadium, which is the home of English Football. We are also delighted to offer a world-class, Elite Performance Centre, St. George's Park in Staffordshire which is an exceptional setting to develop and inspire high-performing England teams and leaders.
We pride ourselves in offering a competitive salary as well as great opportunities to develop and grow in your role. But that is not all; we also have a range of exciting benefits, some of which can be found below:
- Access to event day tickets at Wembley Stadium, alongside a host of regular internal events throughout the season encouraging you to connect and learn with your colleagues and look after your mental health and wellbeing.
- Free, nutritious lunches, at Wembley Stadium and St. George's Park.
- Free private medical cover.
- A contributory pension scheme.
- An additional Thank You days leave, volunteering days as well as 25 days annual leave.
- A hybrid working model offering greater flexibility.
For more information on what it is like to work at The FA, please visit our FA Careers page, https://www.thefa.com/about-football-association/careers
Our Organisation
The Football Association [The FA] is the not-for-profit governing body of football in England. It is responsible for promoting and developing every level of the game, from grassroots through to the professional game, and generates significant revenue to support investment into English football each year.
The FA oversees England international teams across men's, women's, youth and disability football, as well as running the National League System and FA Competitions including the Emirates FA Cup, Barclays FA Women's Super League, FA Women's Championship, and Women's Adobe FA Cup, and the world-class facilities of Wembley Stadium and St. George's Park,
all with a purpose to Unite the Game and Inspire the Nation.
We currently work within a hybrid working model whereby the expectation is to work from your contractual location for part of the week, and as and when required by the team. The remaining days can be worked remotely. We will continue to monitor this model and it may be adjusted in future if deemed necessary.
Your contract with The FA will specify a fixed location of Wembley Stadium or St. George's Park unless the role is advertised as a home-based contract. The contractual location of this role can be found at the top of this advert on our FA vacancy page.
The FA, For All, For You
Our equality, diversity and inclusion strategy forms an integral part of our long-term commitment to using our influence across English football to create a game free from discrimination.
https://www.thefa.com/-/media/thefacom-new/files/about-the-fa/2021/fa_a-game-for-all-strategy.ashx
A Game For All outlines three key strategic commitments – Lead the Change, Be the Change, and Inspire the Change – which will ensure tackling discrimination remains a core priority for English football for years to come.
We are a diverse workplace, aspiring to represent football across the country. The Football Association actively promotes inclusion and diversity, encouraging you to be the best version of yourself at work.
We welcome applications from everyone and are proud to be an equal opportunities employer. If you have any particular requirements in respect of the recruitment or interview process, please mention this during your application.
As part of The FA's commitment to ensuring a safe environment for everyone in football, every employee will be required to complete a DBS check. The level of the check required will be based on the activity of the specific job role and in line with legislation and government guidance.