Data engineering in Birmingham
HSBC UK runs its head office from Birmingham, and the city's financial services operations teams live on management information. Volumes, service levels, complaints, exceptions and backlogs are reported daily, and in many teams those reports are built by hand from extracts of three or four systems, then checked by someone else because the last one was wrong.
We build the pipelines that make those reports assemble themselves: sources landed once in a warehouse you own, one agreed definition of each measure, and checks that stop a report going out when a feed is late or incomplete. On FM360 we learned that a pipeline reporting success is not the same as a report being current, so we monitor what the reader sees. The analyst's time goes into explaining the numbers instead of building them.
Birmingham's software buyers are mostly not software companies. The city runs on financial and professional services: HSBC UK's head office at Centenary Square, the Birmingham office Goldman Sachs opened in 2021 with a technology focus, and the accountancy and law firms around Colmore Row and Snowhill. What they bring us is internal systems rather than consumer products: client portals, case and matter management, reporting that currently takes a week of spreadsheets, and integrations between platforms that different departments bought at different times.
Construction, transport and manufacturing make up the rest. HS2's Curzon Street terminus and the regeneration around it keep engineering consultancies, contractors and their supply chains busy, and those firms run on drawings, inspections, documents and project controls spread across too many tools. Manufacturing brings its own lesson. The 2025 cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover stopped production at its West Midlands plants for weeks and reached deep into the supplier base, and suppliers now want business systems they can restore quickly and integrations that pick up cleanly when they come back.
The city has also watched its council's Oracle programme. The Register reports a forecast cost of £144.4 million against an original estimate of around £19 million, with the finance system still not working as intended. The lesson local buyers draw is the right one: customise less, test the money flows before go-live, and keep the people who use the system in the room. Hiring is competitive but cheaper than London, and the banks and professional firms compete for the same engineers. ITJobsWatch puts the median advertised salary for a software engineer in Birmingham at £70,000 over the six months to September 2026.
Working with us from Birmingham needs no adjustment on your side. Four hours of every working day overlap with yours, set across your morning, so stand-up and the decisions that follow happen live with the engineer who writes the code. The afternoon runs on written updates and pull requests in your own Slack, GitHub and Linear, with runbooks and architecture notes written as the work goes.
We are the right fit for a defined piece of work: an integration, a replacement for the spreadsheet, a portal with a deadline, or the groundwork before your own hire starts. We add senior capacity within days, begin with a fixed-price two-week piece so you can judge the output, and work white-label under your name for agencies.
Four ways this arrives.
Two definitions of the same metric, computed in two places. We pick one, write it as a tested model in version control, and point every report at it, so the argument moves from whose number is right to what the definition should be.
A job reports success while the report still shows yesterday. We give every table a written freshness guarantee, monitor what the reader actually sees rather than the job that feeds it, and alert a person when the guarantee is missed.
A CRM, an ERP or a work-order tool reachable only through its API. We build the sync with retries, rate limits and normalisation at the boundary, and keep append-only snapshots so last Tuesday is a query rather than a restore.
Analytical queries running against the application database at the worst possible moment. We move them to a columnar store, keep Postgres for transactions, and feed one from the other by change data capture or scheduled extracts, whichever the freshness requirement calls for.
A nightly work-order extract into append-only ClickHouse snapshots, with a verifier that reads the live Tableau dashboard to prove it shows the newest data.
Read the write-up →Asked by Birmingham teams.
How do you work with teams in Birmingham?+
Four hours of every working day overlap with yours, set across your Birmingham morning, so stand-up and the day's decisions happen live. We join your calls and work in your tools: Slack, GitHub and Linear. You talk directly to the engineer who writes the code. The afternoon carries on in pull requests and written updates you can read when you are back at your desk, with runbooks and architecture notes written as we go.
Do you build for Birmingham law and accountancy firms?+
Yes. For the firms around Colmore Row and Snowhill we build client portals that work on a phone and ask for each piece of information once, matter and case management tools, and reports that assemble themselves instead of taking a week of spreadsheets. For accountancy practices we build AI features that pull figures from bank statements and receipts, suggest categories and put the result in front of an accountant to approve.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Birmingham?+
ITJobsWatch puts the median advertised salary for a software engineer in Birmingham at around £70,000. Our published rate is $35/hour with a $5,000 minimum engagement. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and we can start within days of the first call. Most clients begin with a fixed-price two-week piece at $2,800, which lets you judge us on working software before committing to more.
Should we replace our ERP or build around it?+
Usually build around it, at least first. Birmingham has seen what heavy customisation can cost. Most of the pain sits in the gaps between an ERP and the rest of the business, and every customisation makes the ERP harder to upgrade. We build small tools alongside it that talk to it through supported interfaces. If replacement is genuinely the answer, we will say so and set out what to test before go-live.
Do we need a data warehouse yet?+
Maybe not. If your reporting runs comfortably against a Postgres read replica, a warehouse adds a second system to pay for and keep in step. The signs you need one: analytical queries slowing the product, data from several sources that has to be joined, or history you must keep that the application overwrites. We will tell you which side of that line you are on.
Why ClickHouse rather than Snowflake or BigQuery?+
Not always. For steady, high-volume analytical work, ClickHouse is fast and cheap to run, self-hosted or on its managed cloud, and we run it in production. Snowflake and BigQuery ask less of you operationally and suit ad hoc querying across a large team. If nobody on your side wants to operate a database, we will recommend the managed option even when the invoice is larger.
What does a freshness guarantee actually mean?+
A written statement per table or report, such as "never more than an hour behind" or "reflects yesterday's close by 07:00". Each one has a check that measures it and an alert that fires when it is missed. Without it, stale data looks exactly like correct data until somebody makes a decision on it.
Can you work with the tools we already have?+
Usually, yes. If you already run dbt, Airflow, Fivetran or a BI tool your team knows, we build inside it. We suggest replacing a tool only when it is the cause of the problem you hired us for, and we show you the evidence before asking you to fund a migration.
How do you handle personal data in the warehouse?+
We decide what should reach the warehouse at all before building the pipeline. Identifiers can be hashed or tokenised at ingestion, sensitive columns restricted by role, and retention enforced by the pipeline itself. Every field is documented from source to dashboard, so anyone can see where a number came from and who can read it.