Data Engineer

Citywire's data platform powers products across the company, both internal and external, from our industry ratings to our growing estate of production AI systems. We're hiring a Data Engineer to help build the pipelines and data models at the heart of it - taking requirements from stakeholder teams and turning them into tested, scheduled, monitored production systems. This is a growth role by design. You'll work directly with, and be mentored by, the platform lead - on architecture, on production engineering discipline, and on working effectively with AI coding agents at production scale.

What you'll be doing:

• Production data modelling: Translate analyst requirements and SQL into robust, production-grade dbt models (source 12 warehouse 12 reporting layers). You'll own data contracts, documentation, testing, and scheduling, with orchestration managed via Prefect.
• Large-scale fund and manager performance computation: Help decompose a legacy performance engine into a modern, event-driven AWS architecture (EventBridge, SQS, Lambda, S3, RDS). You'll build parallel compute pipelines using Spark on EMR (no deep prior Spark experience needed, just a strong curiosity for distributed systems).
• Data models for AI systems: Partner with the Platform Lead to design, build, and maintain the data models powering our AI platform - spanning fund and share class data, clickstream interactions, and CRM and finance systems.
• Alerting and observability: Ensure operational health across all pipelines via structured logging, metrics, DLQ tracking, and purposeful alerting. We view observability as a core engineering practice and will support your growth in designing resilient event-driven systems.
• Work directly with the analyst team and the data quality team, from requirement through deployment.

What we're looking for:

• Real dbt experience: You've built and maintained models in a genuine project - incremental logic, tests, an understanding of why downstream consumers matter. It doesn't need to have been enormous; it needs to have been real. BigQuery experience is a plus; another warehouse is fine.
• Solid Python and SQL skills, with the instinct that code going to production deserves tests.
• Practical AWS Experience: You have hands-on experience deploying and debugging in AWS. You don't need to know every service we use on day one - we'll teach you our specific stack.
• Strong CLI Skills: Proficient with terminal-driven workflows, containerized environments, and shell scripting for debugging, automation, and local development.
• Pragmatic AI Tooling: You leverage AI coding assistants to speed up your workflow, but bring critical oversight to their output - reviewing, testing, and verifying generated code rather than shipping it on faith.
• Data Intuition & Rigor: You look beyond passing CI/CD checks. When a pipeline runs green but the outputs look off, you dig into the numbers, comparing runs, spotting unexpected anomalies, and validating the business logic behind the data.
• Accountability & Resilience: You take pride in what you build. You learn from production mistakes, own the outcome, and prefer holding accountability for your own pipelines over handing off maintenance to someone else.
• Collaborative Communication: You can sit side-by-side with analysts, understand the intent behind their SQL, and partner with them to translate complex business logic into efficient, production-ready solutions.

Nice to Have (Genuinely learnable here - we will train you):

• Frameworks & Tools: Spark on EMR, Prefect (or experience transferring from Airflow/Dagster), OpenSearch.
• Architecture: Event-driven design patterns, SurrealDB or graph data stores.
• Domain Knowledge: Financial services or asset management context.

Company Benefits

• 25 days annual leave (goes up to 28 after 3 years service, 29 after 4 and 30 after 5 years service)
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Well-being Subsidy
• Pension Scheme
• Tech scheme plus so much potential to learn and develop within your role
• Opportunity to work with modern technologies and the opportunity to explore and innovate with new tech
• We also give you 10% of your working time for your own personal development.