Data Operations Engineer

Fastmarkets is an industry-leading price-reporting agency (PRA) and information provider for global commodities, providing price data, news, analytics and events for the agriculture, forest products, metals and mining and new-generation energy markets. Fastmarkets' data is critical for customers seeking to understand and predict dynamic, sometimes opaque markets, enabling trading and risk management. Fastmarkets is a global business with a history dating back to 1865 and is built on trust and deep market knowledge. It has more than 600 employees spread across global locations in the UK, US, China, Singapore, Brazil, Belgium, Finland and beyond.

Fastmarkets is seeking a motivated Data Operations Engineer to join our worldwide team. As we evolve our data management practices, we are looking for someone with a genuine passion for data and AI platforms who is eager to grow their expertise in DataOps practices. Reporting to the Head of Cloud, you will play a key role in supporting and modernising our data infrastructure — ensuring our data platforms are performant, resilient, and secure.

This role is ideal for someone coming from a DevOps, platform engineering, or big data operations background who understands how data platforms and AI workloads run in practice. You do not need deep expertise in every tool we use today — what matters is intellectual curiosity, a desire to learn, and a solid grounding in how data flows through modern systems.

You will collaborate with Data, Engineering, and Cyber teams to align operational goals, challenge existing processes, and help drive operational excellence across our Snowflake, Dagster, and Qlik platforms.

We recruit talented, dynamic people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, all united by a belief in our mission to provide the world’s leading and most trusted price reporting, events, and intelligence service for the markets we serve. We’re proud to be an equal opportunities employer and are committed to creating a fully inclusive workplace, where everyone feels able to participate and contribute meaningfully.

If you are open-minded, curious, resilient, solutions-oriented and committed to promoting equality, then read on...

KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS

We are looking for a highly motivated individual who is driven by a genuine interest in data and AI platforms, and who is happy to work flexibly as part of a global, collaborative team.

Essential

• A genuine passion for data, AI, and modern data platform technologies, with a clear desire to learn and grow in a DataOps discipline.

• Foundational understanding of how data moves through systems — pipelines, ingestion, transformation, storage, and serving — whether from study, personal projects, or professional experience.

• Exposure to big data concepts or platforms (e.g. data warehouses, data lakes, streaming data, or batch processing), either as a practitioner or in a supporting infrastructure/DevOps capacity.

• Some experience with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, or GCP) in an operational context — deploying, monitoring, or maintaining services rather than software development.

• Comfortable with scripting for automation — Bash, Python, or PowerShell — and a willingness to develop these skills further.

• Familiarity with monitoring and observability concepts: understanding what "healthy" looks like for a data platform and how to detect when it isn't.

• A problem-solving mindset with a track record of questioning existing processes and suggesting improvements.

• Strong collaboration skills; able to work effectively across Data, Engineering, and Cyber teams across multiple time zones.

Desirable

• Hands-on experience operating or supporting a big data platform (e.g. Spark, Kafka, Databricks, Hadoop, or equivalent) or an AI/ML platform in a DevOps or platform engineering role.

• Working knowledge of Snowflake or a comparable cloud data warehouse — querying, user and role management, performance basics.

• Awareness of data orchestration tools such as Dagster, Airflow, or similar Python-based workflow frameworks.

• Experience with containerisation (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) in the context of data workloads.

• Infrastructure-as-code experience — Terraform, Bicep, or equivalent — and version control via Git/GitHub.

• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, or similar) applied to data or platform workflows.

• Understanding of RBAC and identity management for data platforms (Azure Active Directory or equivalent).

• Exposure to data backup, restore, and integrity management practices.

• Azure cybersecurity awareness, or a general interest in securing data platform environments.

If you're excited about the role but your experience, skills or qualifications don't perfectly align, we encourage you to apply anyway.

Our Values

Fastmarkets people come from all different walks of life. It’s this mix of brilliant personalities, experiences and insights that gives us that warm, open, and friendly culture you can feel as soon as you meet us. But however wonderfully different we all are, there are six things we all have in common – and they form our Fastmarkets values.

Created by our own employees to reflect some of the personal traits that Fastmarkets people have, our values are key to what makes our culture unique. They reflect who each of us are and they're embedded in everything we do. Our values are:

• METRICS DRIVEN. We use insights to improve our customers’ experience and our business performance
• ACCOUNTABLE. We are accountable to ourselves and those we work with: we keep our promises and get things done
• GROWTH MINDSET. This value enables us to be nimble to the changing realities and operate with a sense of urgency
• INCLUSIVE. We are inclusive and respectful, celebrating each of us and giving everyone a deep sense of belonging with the desire to bring their best self to work every day.
• CUSTOMER CENTRIC. We are customer-centric in all that we do
• COLLABORATIVE. We are collaborative, able to work across teams and capitalise on the diversity of intellect, perspectives, and experiences.

You’ve read a little about us – now it’s over to you!

If you like what you’ve read so far and think you can see yourself as a Fastmarkets person, it’s time to fill in your application form. This form is an important part of the selection process: it’s used to determine whether or not you’ll be chosen to have an interview and acts as a basis for the questions we’ll ask you on the day.

It’s vital that you try to capture all the relevant information we have asked for on the form so we can get a good feel for who you are and why you’re great.