About the job

Job summary

Ofgem works on behalf of energy consumers to ensure that every household and business in the UK can rely on a safe, affordable and environmentally sustainable energy supply. We are playing a vital part in accelerating the transition to Net Zero and a carbon neutral energy system - a goal that everyone wants to achieve. Whatever your role, you’ll be playing your part in creating new energy solutions that are great for customers, and great for the environment.

We offer a diverse range of flexible working career opportunities: roles that are stimulating and rewarding, where you can get involved in ground-breaking work. And it’s important to us that we recruit from a wide range of professional and personal backgrounds – bringing different perspectives and experiences to our work.

Effective use of data is vital to what we do – it accelerates robust decision making, ensures consistency and supports self-service across Ofgem. As a Senior Data Modeller, you will play a key role in the design, creation and maintenance of various metadata repositories. These will include data models (conceptual, logical and physical), technical metadata (taxonomies/data dictionaries) and operational metadata (data lineage and transformation). You will also define physical data structures such as DDL scripts and semantic layers such as SQL views for use by business users. We’re looking for someone who can bring an analytical approach to their work and support the development of scalable and flexible solutions that are tailored to organisational need.

We expect that you will already have experience of leading the evaluation development and maintenance of metadata repositories, logical data models, physical database structures and database queries according to best practice – developing an expert knowledge of SQL as a result. You’ll be accustomed to working with data modelling tools and industry standard techniques to capture and document data artefacts and be knowledgeable on topics such as data lineage, data usage and data structures. It’s important that you have excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, enabling you to advise on analytic process concepts and technologies, adapting your approach to different audiences. As a senior member of the team, it’s also important that you can coach and mentor others – offering sound technical advice and guidance to colleagues.

Job description

The Senior Data Modeller role is in the Insight Data Architecture team within the Data & Digital function and is core to delivering organisation wide insights to help accelerate robust decision making, drive consistency and enable self-service across Ofgem.  
The Senior Data Modeller will be responsible setting the functions direction for the design, creation, and maintenance of various metadata repositories such as data models (conceptual, logical and physical), technical metadata (taxonomies/data dictionaries) and operational metadata (data lineage and transformation). They will also define physical table structures (e.g. DDL scripts) and semantic layers for use by business users (e.g. SQL views).  
The ideal candidate will take an analytical approach to problem solving and will produce scalable and flexible solutions appropriate to the either operational or analytical use cases i.e. transactional, streaming, data warehouse or data science requirements.  
The successful candidate will work as part of a cross-disciplinary team and will be confident in stakeholder management, able to rationalise modelling decisions and articulate best practice principles to both technical and non-technical service users.  
Data and analytics driven insights are critical to Ofgem and an essential part of delivering its regulatory aspiration and vision, data modellers will play an important role in enabling this by codifying business concepts and processes into the data foundations of the organisation.

Person specification

Key Responsibilities 

• To support the Data Digital and Technology team deliverables, that utilise your expertise to ensure successful outcomes across team members and collaborating teams. 
• Lead the determination of data layer requirements by analysing organisational and market needs and evaluating current systems.  
• Sets standards for data modelling and design tools and techniques, advise on their application. 
• Collaborate with senior leadership to define data strategy and ensure alignment with Ofgem’s Business goals. 
• Lead the development, validation, publishing, and maintenance of conceptual, logical, and physical data models to support the data knowledge requirements of Ofgem. 
• Lead on the creation and development of Ofgem’s enterprise data model. 
• Provide mentorship to other modelling practitioners and guide them in best practices, modelling techniques and collaborative efforts. Validate Modelling activities across the organisation. 
• Design and maintain metadata repositories enabling the organisation to find and understand their data assets.  
• Define, manage and maintain data models using industry standard modelling and profiling tools and techniques across Ofgem’s disparate data streams.  
• Support the development, integration, administration, and evolution of data structures, ensuring efficiency, scalability and quality. Continuously monitor to enhance performance and reduce latency. 
• Maintain comprehensive documentation of models, standards and best practices for reference and future enhancements. 
• Ensure architectural and engineering concepts are defined and embedded to design solutions that meets operational requirements, such as scalability, maintainability, security, reliability, extensibility, flexibility, availability and manageability. 
• Define, design, develop and embed best practice data modelling standards into the wider architectural community.  

Key Outputs and Deliverables 

• Lead the delivery of strategic assets i.e. Metadata Repositories, Enterprise Logical Data Model (LDM), Logical, Conceptual and Physical data models, best practice guidance, data flow diagrams.  
• Define and embed a consistent and coherent approach to data modelling throughout the organisation.  
• Development of principles, approaches and solutions which enable data models to be understood and used directly by business users, enabling analytical self-serve within a set of ‘guard rails’.  
• A culture that promotes data-driven decisions backed by robust and comprehensive models.  
• Delivery of a central modelling ability to ensure quality, traceability, transparency, timeliness, usability and cost-effectiveness.  
• Conduct peer reviews, develop optimisations and recommendations throughout the lifecycle of data product development from it’s logical design through to physical implementation and query layer consumption. 

Essential Criteria

• Strong experience developing OLAP data models (Lead criteria). 
• Strong experience of leading the evaluation development and maintenance of metadata repositories, logical data models, physical database structures and database queries according to best practice (expert knowledge of SQL required) (Lead criteria). 
• Demonstrable experience using data modelling tools and industry standard techniques to capture and document data artefacts.  
• Strong stakeholder management with the ability to translate complex business requirements into scalable, interoperable, and flexible data models. 
• Ability to communicate in technical detail on topics of data lineage, data usage and data structures.  

Desirable Criteria

• Track record of working within a cloud-based technology landscape.  
• Experience in integrating complex, cross-organisation processes and data models, ideally within a highly regulated environment.  

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £45,614, OFGEM contributes £12,315 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

Things you need to know

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours and Technical skills.

When you press the ‘Apply now’ button, you will be asked to complete personal details (not seen by the sift panel), and upload a copy of your CV anonymising all details where necessary.  

You will then be asked to answer 3 Technical Questions evidencing how you meet the essential and desirable skills and capabilities listed in the role profile. Please ensure you demonstrate clearly, within these answers how you meet each of the essential and desirable skills and capabilities. 

The Civil Service values honesty and integrity and expect all candidates to abide by these principles. Ofgem take any incidences of cheating very seriously. Please ensure all examples provided are of your own experience. Any instances of plagiarism or other forms of cheating will be investigated and, if proven, the relevant applications will be withdrawn from the process. 

Feedback will only be provided if you attend an interview or assessment.

Security

Successful candidates must undergo a criminal record check. People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window). The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria. The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.