Senior Data Engineer

About Atom Learning

We're Atom Learning and our mission is to help every child reach their potential.

We combine exceptional teacher-made content with technology, data science and machine learning to make high-quality, personalised education more accessible. Our aim is to give every child access to the kind of insight, support and individualised learning that was once largely limited to expensive private education and tutoring.

We're one of Europe's fastest-growing EdTech companies. Since 2018 we've grown from a startup of four friends to over 100 people, with specialists across education, engineering, product, learning design and marketing.

The scale is real:

• Nearly half a million children have learned on Atom, answering more than 750 million questions. Last academic year alone, 180,000 students answered over 210 million questions.

• For families: over 170,000 children have used Atom Home to build core skills and prepare for exams, answering more than 440 million questions along the way. Our GCSE product, Home Senior, launched in February 2026 and more than 30,000 students are already learning on it.

• For schools: around 1,900 schools and more than 24,000 teachers use Atom in the UK and internationally. Quest Progress, our standardised assessment platform, has delivered more than 1.1 million assessments since launching in September 2024.

We're remote-first! While our main office is in London, our team of over 100 people (and counting) works across 10 countries.

The role

We’re looking for a Senior Data Engineer to help shape the data platform behind some of our most important products.

Data at Atom isn't simply a reporting or support function. It powers customer-facing products that predict real-world exam outcomes, personalise what children learn next and help teachers understand where to focus their time and attention.

On our busiest days, more than a million new question responses flow through the platform. You'll be one of our go-to specialists for data engineering, taking ownership of how that data is collected, moved, transformed, modelled and made available across Atom.

Your impact will come in two ways. You'll contribute directly to data-powered product features, such as predicted grades, adaptive learning and exam outcome probabilities, while also helping other engineers and teams use data effectively. That might mean solving the data problem behind a new customer feature, helping an engineer navigate an unfamiliar part of the data platform, or creating tooling and patterns that make trusted data easier for everyone to use.

You'll work closely with engineers, product managers, education experts and colleagues across the business to turn complex problems into effective, reusable solutions.

This is a role for someone who wants to build excellent data infrastructure, but also cares deeply about what that infrastructure enables: better products, better decisions and ultimately better outcomes for learners.

How we work

Our culture is built on freedom, trust and high agency. We expect our engineers to be product-minded, curious and comfortable taking ownership beyond the boundaries of their specialism.

AI-assisted engineering is a core part of how we work. We use AI to learn faster, research unfamiliar problems, prototype ideas, explore alternatives and get to better solutions sooner. We believe its biggest value is in making strong engineers more capable, not simply helping them produce more code.

AI increases the amount we can execute, but it makes engineering judgement more important, not less. We value people who can work through ambiguity, decide what should be built, understand the trade-offs and take responsibility for the impact of their work rather than simply completing a well-defined task.

Your deepest expertise will be in data engineering, but you’ll understand the wider product, collaborate closely across disciplines and contribute wherever your expertise can have the greatest impact.

Our application data lives primarily in CockroachDB, with a modern data platform built around BigQuery, dbt, Airflow and pub/sub. Data flows both ways: into analytics and modelling, and back into the products our customers use.

That culture translates into a flat hierarchy with a high degree of autonomy, where engineers collaborate closely, share expertise freely and are trusted to use their judgement, shape solutions and take meaningful ownership of outcomes.

What you’ll do

• Build and evolve the data foundations behind customer-facing products, including predictive features, adaptive learning and assessment insights.

• Own the design, development and ongoing improvement of reliable, scalable data pipelines and models.

• Shape the technical direction of our data platform and improve how data moves between our application, warehouse and product surfaces.

• Build clean, well-tested and reusable solutions using Python, SQL and dbt.

• Improve data quality, observability and reliability so teams can trust the data they use.

• Work with product, engineering, commercial teams and educational experts to understand problems, shape solutions and measure their impact.

• Make data easier for others to use by creating clear models, tooling and patterns that help engineers and teams self-serve safely and confidently.

• Use AI tools and agents throughout your work to research, prototype, investigate and get to better solutions faster.

• Contribute beyond the data layer where it helps solve a problem effectively, including product features, APIs, internal tools or automation.

• Review code, share expertise and help raise the standard of data engineering across Atom.

• Mentor other engineers and help develop data capability across the wider engineering team.

Who you are

• You thrive in a high-trust, high-autonomy environment with high expectations, and use that freedom with purpose.

• You focus your judgement and energy on the problems that create the most meaningful impact, whether that’s for learners, teachers, colleagues or the wider business.

• You’re collaborative, low-ego and generous with your expertise. You enjoy helping others succeed and making the people around you more effective.

• You have significant experience designing, building, maintaining and scaling production data pipelines and platforms.

• You have strong Python and SQL skills and produce clear, maintainable and well-tested code.

• You understand data modelling, database architecture and the trade-offs involved in building reliable, scalable data systems.

• You have experience with cloud data warehouses, orchestration tools and transformation frameworks.

• You take end-to-end ownership of problems from initial discovery through to implementation, monitoring and continuous improvement.

• You can turn ambiguous requirements into practical solutions while balancing speed, quality and longer-term scalability.

• You communicate clearly with technical and non-technical colleagues and can make complex data problems understandable.

• You use AI tools and agents confidently as part of how you learn, investigate and build.

• You’re comfortable working beyond a narrowly defined specialism when that is what the problem requires.

Experience that will set you apart

• Experience with BigQuery, Airflow and dbt, or equivalent modern data technologies.

• Experience with CockroachDB, Postgres or other distributed/relational databases, including CDC or event-driven data pipelines.

• Knowledge of data visualisation preferably Tableau or Metabase.

• Experience making data safely self-service through internal tooling, analytics platforms or LLM-powered interfaces.

• Experience supporting product analytics or building data-powered product features.

Benefits

• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays;

• 3 days winter leave;

• Work from anywhere in the UK or within GMT +/-2 hours time zone; we're a remote-first company;

• Annual L&D budget;

• Private medical;

• EMI options available;

• Access to wellbeing platform;

• Competitive pay;

• Enhanced family leave;

• Monthly remote and in-person events in London;

• High degree of autonomy and exposure to the running of all business areas of a successful startup;

• Brilliant colleagues and the opportunity to become an integral member of a fast-growing tech company.
  

Commitment to Equal Opportunity

At Atom, diversity and inclusion is a priority, but also a necessity. To create a new standard for education across the world, we need a team of people with diverse perspectives so that we can challenge the status quo and reimagine learning experiences that work for everyone.

We're an equal opportunity employer that is committed to fostering an inclusive environment, where everyone can be themselves and have an impact. We encourage all applications irrespective of gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, age, nationality, marital status, and disability.

We also aren’t too concerned about qualifications, or whether you’ve followed the “conventional path” to get here. In fact, we highly value experience from other industries and walks of life - so don’t hesitate to apply, even if you don’t think you meet the exact criteria in this job description, we can work with you on the rest!