Description:
Lead Data Engineer (Permanent, London on-site)
A high-growth AI software company is looking for a Lead Data Engineer to own and scale the data foundations behind an AI-driven operations platform used by property teams. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role where you'll define the data architecture, set engineering standards and build systems that power product analytics and modern AI capabilities.
What you'll do
- Architect and build scalable data pipelines and distributed data systems
- Design ingestion, transformation and storage patterns for operational and AI workloads
- Deliver batch and real-time/streaming pipelines
- Build and optimise vector search and retrieval pipelines that support AI features
- Implement monitoring, observability and data quality frameworks
- Drive security, reliability and governance across the data layer
- Partner closely with backend and AI engineers to support training, inference and product delivery
- Influence technical direction and help shape the future data team as the company scales
What we're looking for
- Demonstrable experience in data engineering or backend engineering with proven architecture ownership
- Good level of Python engineering skills
- Strong relational database experience (PostgreSQL preferred) including performance and query optimisation
- Exposure to NoSQL systems
- Comfortable building from scratch in a fast-moving, product-led environment
- Experience with vector databases and vector search in modern AI systems
- Desirable: Spark, Airflow, Kafka, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, event-driven architectures
- Cloud experience (AWS, GCP or Azure) is a plus
Why join
- High impact and ownership as an early senior hire
- Work with a strong engineering team on real AI product challenges
- Competitive salary
If you are an experienced Data Engineer seeking a challenging opportunity to lead and innovate within a transformative AI company, we encourage you to apply now and become a vital part of our client's mission.
Unfortunately sponsorship is not available for this role.
