Founding Data Engineer

Data Engineer | AI startup, tier‑one VC backed | London (hybrid, 2-3 days) |

We're hiring for a fast-growing, VC-backed startup building AI-powered software for a safety‑critical sector. This is currently the most business‑critical technical hire on their roadmap, tied to a live enterprise deployment.

You’ll be:

• Extracting data from legacy, semi‑on‑prem, non‑uniform systems where APIs are often limited or non‑existent, using non-standard ingestion routes rather than a clean API‑first approach
• Building data models, pipelines, and last‑mile integrations/connectors across genuinely fragmented, real‑world infrastructure, not a clean greenfield stack
• Owning the back‑end services those pipelines run on, including infrastructure as code
• Handling ETL, schema mapping, and reconciliation across legacy and modern systems side by side
• Working with zero‑copy and data virtualisation approaches where direct extraction isn't possible
• Operating in short iterative cycles with high autonomy and no fixed playbook

Core skills:

• Genuine experience getting data out of legacy or undocumented systems without relying on modern APIs, screen‑scraping, UI automation, batch exports, direct database access, whatever the environment demands
• Production back‑end services experience (Node/TypeScript or Python), including infrastructure as code (Terraform or Pulumi)
• Data modelling, legacy systems, backend‑to‑warehouse flows
• ETL, schema mapping, and reconciliation across old and new systems
• Solid AWS/cloud, end‑to‑end across the stack: VPC, ECS, Lambda, S3, KMS
• Security awareness: GuardDuty, SecurityHub or equivalent
• Data warehousing (Redshift, Glue, Synapse or Snowflake) and orchestration (Airflow, dbt or Prefect)
• Comfort with streaming/connectivity (Kafka, JDBC/ODBC) and data quality/schema tooling (Great Expectations, Pydantic, Avro/Protobuf)

Strong plus, not required:

• Regulated data experience (law enforcement, health, legal, fintech, government)
• Event or temporal data modelling
• UI‑based legacy ingestion tooling specifically
• Dual cloud and on‑prem deployment experience

What we’re looking for:

• A blend of startup pace and larger‑company depth. Comfortable owning ambiguity, but able to handle complex, regulated environments

Compensation:

• Early equity allocation, with a commitment to top up early joiners further
• Discretionary bonus once revenue begins
• Pension matching, private health and dental cover
• Hybrid working, London preferred, flexibility for strong senior candidates elsewhere in the UK provided they’re well‑connected and open to occasional travel
• Must‑have: Able to attain security clearance (UK national or 3+ years continuous UK residency), security clearance required, no visa sponsorship, no exceptions on this one.