Manager, Data Architecture

**Manager, Data Architecture**

**Ongoing Full-Time role**

**Location: Sydney**

**Hybrid working from home**

**About the Department of Education**

The Department of Education is the largest provider of public education in Australia with responsibility for delivering high-quality public education to two-thirds of the NSW student population.

For more information about the Department of Education, please visit NSW Department of Education

**About School Infrastructure**

School Infrastructure NSW (SINSW) is delivering new school buildings, major upgrades and maintenance strategies to ensure every school-aged child has access to high quality education facilities at their local public school. This encompasses the largest investment in public education infrastructure in the history of NSW

**About the role**

With over 4 million physical assets from across over 2200 schools (and growing), SINSW has a lot of data to maintain. From forecasting when the external paint on a specific building in a single school should be repainted, calculating the solar power needed to power a school in remote NSW, determining a school’s catchment area to generating 3D floor plans for prospective schools and buildings, properly formed and understood data is key to deliver the very best school infrastructure to meet the needs of a growing population, and support modern, flexible teaching and learning.

Whilst we have a relatively robust and rich data set covering our assets, our data structures were designed over 25 years ago and have grown to be unnecessarily complex and difficult to interrogate. We need your help to transform our data to be extensible, flexible and most importantly, accessible.

We are not looking for someone who wants to just be a DBA nor are we looking for a data scientist who doesn’t want to create data structures and setup basic data pipelines. We need someone who understands complex data structures, understands the difference between an ontology and taxonomy and can explain their purpose and when they’re appropriate to be used to others in the team. We need you to be able to build a pipeline suitable for data science, can understand and explain why and when you might implement non-relational databases and eventually create data models that feed into our forecasting teams. We need you to be able to take hierarchical, highly relational data and allow us to move to modern, cloud-based solutions that are securely accessible to all and any who need it. Not a requirement, but we’d also love for you to have some experience working with spatial data.

This role needs someone who is comfortable communicating with business stakeholders to understand their needs in terms of data. This is important because many of our current business processes, tools and ways of working are designed around existing systems and how we currently store and use our data. We want to ensure future data and systems are instead designed around the ways we want to do business. You will need to understand our stakeholders to ensure you can create data in a way that gives them what they need.

Success in the role will be delivery of a centralised dataset that draws upon the variety of existing datasets, sourced both internally, from across our different apps/tools, and externally, such as live solar panel output data or bushfire risk forecasts that can be easily accessible by people ranging from software engineers to, where appropriate, the general public.

**Essential requirements of the role**
- Tertiary qualifications or equivalent experience in information technology, financial or business management or other related fields.

**Key knowledge and experience**
- Knowledge of and commitment to implementing the Department’s Aboriginal Education Policy and upholding the Department’s Partnership Agreement with the NSW AECG and to ensure quality outcomes for Aboriginal people.

**About you**

If it isn’t already obvious from the job ad so far, you should have experience working with Data and Databases, with preference given to those who have had experience working with Oracle and/or the migration of existing datasets/databases to modern systems such as knowledge graphs.

Prior experience within Government organisations is not required.

**Benefits**
- Opportunity to make a difference at Department of Education
- Flexible work-life balance
- Competitive salary
- 35 hour week

**How to apply**

**Targeted Question 1**

Given our NSW schools’ physical infrastructure is made up of a wide range of physical assets that SINSW is responsible for maintaining, such as (but not limited to) toilet blocks, solar panels, footy fields, classrooms or carpets - in less than one page, explain the benefits for (or against) of using graph-based data structures/models to store this.

**Targeted Question 2**

In less than one page, demonstrate a basic data structure/design for a classroom, including any typical objects found within, not including humans.