Lead Data Engineer - Founding Member (Contract, Full-Time) [HR208] (UK)
smart-working-solutions Lead Data Engineer - Founding Member (Contract, Full-Time) [HR208] (UK)
Summary
The Lead Data Engineer will architect and scale data infrastructure for an AI-powered property management platform, managing real-time pipelines, vector databases, and ML workflows. As the first senior data hire, this role involves defining the technical stack, engineering standards, and data strategy while collaborating with AI and product teams.
About Smart Working
At Smart Working, we believe your job should not only look right on paper but also feel right every day. This isn’t just another remote opportunity - it’s about finding where you truly belong, no matter where you are. From day one, you’re welcomed into a genuine community that values your growth and well-being. Our mission is simple: to break down geographic barriers and connect skilled professionals with outstanding global teams and products for full-time, long-term roles. We help you discover meaningful work with teams that invest in your success, where you’re empowered to grow personally and professionally.
Join one of the highest-rated workplaces on Glassdoor and experience what it means to thrive in a truly remote-first world.
About the Role
We are looking for a Lead Data Engineer to build and lead the data infrastructure powering an intelligent AI assistant platform. This role will architect and scale the systems that power our AI products, from real-time data pipelines and analytics infrastructure to vector databases and machine learning data workflows.
You will work closely with AI engineers, backend engineers, and product teams to ensure our platform can process large volumes of operational data reliably and intelligently. You will define our data architecture, tooling, and engineering standards, and play a key role in building the foundations of the future data team.
Responsibilities
- Architect and build scalable data pipelines and infrastructure to support AI and product systems.
- Design and maintain data ingestion, transformation and storage architectures for operational and AI workloads.
- Develop and manage batch and real-time data pipelines.
- Build and optimise systems for vector search, retrieval and machine learning data pipelines.
- Ensure data reliability, security and governance across the platform.
- Collaborate with AI and backend engineering teams to support training, inference and product features.
- Implement monitoring, observability and data quality frameworks.
- Optimise the performance of large-scale datasets and query systems.
- Contribute to technical architecture decisions and long-term data strategy.
- Act as the founding data hire, defining culture, standards and the hiring bar for the data function as it scales.
- Partner directly with founders and product leadership to translate data capabilities into product decisions.
Requirements
- 7+ years of professional experience, with the majority of that experience in dedicated data engineering roles.
- Strong experience designing and building data pipelines and distributed data systems.
- Experience working with relational databases, with PostgreSQL preferred, although MySQL or similar is acceptable.
- Experience working with NoSQL databases.
- Strong programming experience in Python.
- Demonstrated ability to make and justify architectural decisions, rather than only implementing them.
- Experience building scalable backend systems.
- Experience designing data models and storage architectures.
- Strong understanding of data processing performance and optimisation.
- Experience with some of the following data frameworks and infrastructure technologies is highly desirable: Apache Spark, Apache Airflow, Kafka, and Elasticsearch or OpenSearch.
- Experience with relevant database technologies is highly desirable, including PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and vector databases such as Qdrant, Milvus or pgvector.
- Experience with Python data-processing libraries such as Pandas or Polars is highly desirable.
Nice to Have
- Experience working on AI or machine learning platforms.
- Familiarity with stream processing and event-driven architectures.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure such as GCP, AWS or Azure.
- Experience working in high-growth startups or early-stage companies.
- Experience with vector databases used in modern AI systems.
Skills
As published by lever · 16 questions
Basics
In which location did you find the job?, Resume/CV, Full name, Email, Phone, Current location, Current company, LinkedIn URL, Twitter URL, GitHub URL, Portfolio URL
Pick from a list (16)
- Please respond truthfully. How many years of professional experience do you have, with the majority of that experience in dedicated data engineering roles?
- Please respond truthfully. What level of professional experience do you have designing and building scalable data pipelines and distributed data systems?
- Please respond truthfully. What level of professional experience do you have designing data ingestion, transformation and storage architectures for operational and AI workloads?
- Please respond truthfully. What level of professional experience do you have developing and managing both batch and real-time data pipelines?
- Please respond truthfully. What level of professional experience do you have building and optimising vector search, retrieval and machine learning data pipeline systems?
- Please respond truthfully. What level of professional experience do you have using Python for data engineering?
- Please respond truthfully. What level of professional experience do you have with relational databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL or similar, including designing data models and storage architectures?
- Please respond truthfully. What level of professional experience do you have with NoSQL databases such as MongoDB?
- Please respond truthfully. What level of professional experience do you have ensuring data reliability, security and governance, including implementing monitoring, observability and data quality frameworks?
- Please respond truthfully. What level of professional experience do you have making and justifying data architecture decisions and contributing to long-term data strategy?
- Are you comfortable working in a hybrid model based in London?
- What is your availability to start?
- What is your minimum expected base salary in GBP PER YEAR? optional
- What is your minimum expected OTE (on target earnings) in GBP PER YEAR? optional
- Are you open to negotiation?
- Do you currently have the legal right to work in the UK without requiring sponsorship?