The Key Support Services

Systems & Data Engineer

The Key Support Services  •  United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Remote)  •  12 days ago
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Job Description

Job Purpose

The Systems and Data Engineer is responsible for the hands-on development, maintenance, and evolution of the Group’s internal integration infrastructure, home-built micro-services, and AI tooling. The role sits at the intersection of the Systems and Data teams, playing a critical part in ensuring data flows reliably between platforms and that the business can move quickly, confidently, and with the support of modern AI tooling. This is a builder role — the person in this position will be writing code, shipping integrations, and directly contributing to the Group’s AI adoption strategy.

Key Facts

  • The Group is scaling rapidly, with growing demand for integrations, automation, and AI-native workflows across every business function.
  • Our home-built Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a strategic asset that requires ongoing development and maintenance as new systems are onboarded through organic growth and M&A activity.
  • AI tooling — including custom MCP connectors and internal agents — is live, evolving infrastructure that needs hands-on contributors now.
  • Reliable, high-quality data flow between systems is foundational to every commercial and operational function across the Group.
  • This role will grow with the team — there is a clear path from Junior to Mid to Senior as the platform matures.

Role Responsibilities

Integration Development & ESB

  • Design, build, and maintain integrations between internal and third-party systems using the Group’s home-built Enterprise Service Bus.
  • Own the reliability and quality of integration pipelines, proactively monitoring for failures, data inconsistencies, or performance degradation.
  • Collaborate with the Systems team to scope and deliver new integration requirements as the Group onboards additional platforms.
  • Document integration patterns, field mappings, and data flows to ensure maintainability and knowledge continuity.

Micro-Service Development & Maintenance

  • Maintain and extend home-built micro-services, including connectors to Salesforce and source-of-truth CRM systems.
  • Ensure micro-services are resilient, well-tested, and version-controlled, with clear deployment and rollback processes.
  • Contribute to the evolution of internal platforms and supporting databases, working with the broader team to improve architecture over time.
  • Identify and resolve bugs, performance issues, and technical debt across the service landscape.

AI Tooling & MCP Development

  • Design and build custom Model Context Protocol (MCP) connectors that give AI agents structured, secure access to internal systems and data sources.
  • Work closely with the Head of Group Systems & Data to identify high-value automation and AI use cases across both teams.
  • Contribute to prompt engineering for internal AI workflows, ensuring outputs are accurate, reliable, and useful for business users.
  • Stay current with the rapidly evolving AI tooling landscape (Claude, Cursor, agent frameworks) and bring relevant innovations back to the team.

Cross-Team Collaboration

  • Work fluidly between the Systems and Data teams, adapting priorities in line with sprint commitments and business needs.
  • Translate requirements from non-technical stakeholders into well-scoped engineering tasks.
  • Contribute to peer code review, shared coding standards, and team knowledge-sharing practices.

Requirements

Essential

  • Proficiency in Python — able to write clean, maintainable, production-grade code independently.
  • Practical experience building or consuming REST APIs and integration patterns (webhooks, polling, event-driven).
  • Familiarity with Salesforce or similar CRM platforms at an integration/API level.
  • Experience with or strong interest in prompt engineering and working with LLMs (Claude, GPT, or similar).
  • Hands-on experience with Claude and/or Cursor as development tools — comfort using AI to accelerate engineering work.
  • Understanding of relational databases and SQL.
  • Good instincts around error handling, logging, and building for reliability.

Desirable

  • Experience building MCP servers or working with the Model Context Protocol.
  • Exposure to ESB patterns, message queuing, or event-driven architectures.
  • Familiarity with micro-service architecture and containerisation (Docker).
  • Experience with source control best practices (Git, branching strategies, PR workflows).
  • Any exposure to Snowflake, BigQuery, or similar data warehouse tooling.

Behaviours

  • Builder mentality — not satisfied with “good enough”, always looking to improve or extend what exists.
  • Curious and self-directed — comfortable picking up new tools and technologies without needing hand-holding.
  • Detail-oriented — takes pride in clean, well-documented code and reliable pipelines.
  • Collaborative — works well across teams and communicates clearly about blockers, progress, and trade-offs.
  • High agency — takes ownership of problems and follows them through without needing to be chased.

Benefits

Why work for us

We place huge importance on caring for and developing our people. If you join us you can expect a good work-life balance and the training and support you need to succeed in your role and continue to progress. We are a socially conscious company, but one that also likes to have fun. We offer a generous holiday allowance, flexible hours, buying and selling holiday, enhanced maternity pay, free breakfast, fruit, and drinks, regular socials and much more.

The Key Support Services

About The Key Support Services

The pace of change in education means there is no shortage of theory, opinion and advice on what leaders need to do and what they need to know. Leaders themselves are under huge pressure to make a difference with little time to plan, prioritise and learn. In a world like this, ambitious and aspiring education leaders are in constant need of reliable, relevant and authoritative knowledge that’s ready to use.

The Key cuts through the noise to provide up-to-the-minute sector intelligence and resources that empower education leaders with the knowledge to act.

We draw upon a strong social purpose, deep expertise in education and a relentless desire to stay ahead of a vibrant and fast-changing landscape. Our community of members - more than 100,000 leaders of schools and multi-academy trusts from across the country - share our belief that true leadership is about putting theory into practice; that real change happens when leaders can take meaningful action.

Since our founding as a government pilot, we’ve grown into a can-do collective of experts, writers, researchers and technologists who are deeply committed to serving the needs and championing the perspective of education leaders across the country. Our vision is to be an indispensable partner to education leaders determined to make a difference.

Industry
Education & Training
Company Size
51-200 employees
Headquarters
London, GB
Year Founded
2007
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