Lead Data Engineer

London | Hybrid | Up to £160,000 + Equity

We're partnering with a venture-backed AI startup building a category-defining platform that is transforming a multi-billion-pound industry through automation and artificial intelligence. Having already secured early customer traction and strong product demand, they're now looking for a Lead Data Engineer to build the data foundations that will power the next stage of growth.

The Opportunity

As the first senior data hire, you'll take ownership of the entire data platform, designing the architecture, pipelines, and infrastructure that support both product and AI capabilities. You'll work closely with AI and engineering teams, influence technical direction, and play a key role in shaping the future data function.

What You'll Be Doing

• Design and build scalable data pipelines and infrastructure.
• Develop batch and real-time data processing systems.
• Build and optimise data platforms for AI and machine learning workloads.
• Implement monitoring, data quality, governance, and security standards.
• Drive data architecture decisions and help shape the future data team

What We're Looking For

Essential Experience

• 7+ years in Data Engineering, Backend Engineering, or similar.
• Strong experience building distributed data systems and data pipelines.
• Expert-level Python skills.
• Experience with relational and NoSQL databases.
• Experience working with vector databases and modern AI data architectures.
• Strong understanding of data modelling, performance optimisation, and scalable system design.

Tech Stack

Python, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Kafka, Apache Airflow, Apache Spark, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Qdrant, Milvus, pgvector, Pandas, Polars

Nice to Have

• AI / Machine Learning platform experience.
• Cloud exposure (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Event-driven architectures and stream processing.
• JavaScript / Node.js experience.
• Startup or scale-up experience.

London | Hybrid | Up to £160,000 + Equity