Available Positions: Data Engineer

Grade: Assistant Principal Officer (AP)

Employing Authority: Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC)

Location: Office in Dublin 1/ Agile (Hybrid) working available

Closing date: 3pm, Wednesday, 28th May 2025

Starting Salary: €80,668

Division Overview:

The Forensic Technology & Data Analytics Division (FTDA) supports all other Divisions within the CCPC, particularly the Enforcement Divisions, in the areas of Digital Forensics, eDiscovery, Open-Source Intelligence and Data Analytics. The Division has recently undergone an expansion with the full transformation of laboratory systems and technical capabilities.

You will be an integral part of the Forensic Technology and Data Analytics (FTDA) team, comprising a Director (Principal Officer), two Deputy Directors (AP1) and one FTDA Senior Analyst (HEO).

The Role:

We are looking for a Data Engineer with a passion for building intuitive, user-friendly applications to help our investigation teams. Your work will empower investigators to make informed decisions and identify potential breaches of competition and consumer protection law, as well as breaches of other legislation falling within the CCPC’s remit. You will get to work closely with our enforcement teams to understand key indicators and ensure the applications align with enforcement goals.

Your goal will be to simplify complex NLP methodologies into accessible, actionable insights for our Enforcement Divisions.

In this role your work will initially support the role of the CCPC’s Forensic Technology & Data Analytics Division (FTDA) on the following cross divisional projects:

• Screening for bid rigging - detection of collusion in public tendering processes
• Price Indication Directive - Online price monitoring

Key Responsibilities:

• Develop User-Friendly NLP Tools that can analyse large datasets of public tender documents and vendor communications to identify potential collusion or anti-competitive behaviour.
• Pattern Recognition & Anomaly Detection: Use NLP algorithms to detect suspicious patterns in the language, tone, and structure of bids, proposals, and other tender-related documents, flagging possible signs of collusion such as identical language, unusual bid behaviours, or coordinated pricing strategies.
• Develop NLP Tools for Price Monitoring: Build and deploy NLP-based tools to extract and analyse pricing information from various e-commerce platforms, websites, and online marketplaces.
• Simplify NLP for Non-Technical Users: Ensure that the NLP models and results are presented in an easy-to-understand way for non-technical end users, including visualization dashboards, simple reports, and intuitive interfaces that highlight key insights and potential red flags.
• Model Development & Optimization: Develop, fine-tune, and evaluate NLP models for tasks like text classification, sentiment analysis, entity recognition, and similarity detection, with a focus on identifying unethical practices.
• Data Preprocessing & Feature Engineering: Develop robust text preprocessing pipelines that clean and prepare large volumes of unstructured text data (e.g., bids, contracts, emails) for analysis.
• Opportunity to travel and liaise with National and International experts to help solve problems.
• Opportunity to assist the FTDA team in the areas of Digital Forensics, eDiscovery and Open Source Intelligence.
• Opportunity to test and develop in-house Gen AI tools.