Lead Data Engineer in London
Job DescriptionLead Data Engineer | Python, Vector Databases & AI Data Pipelines | Early Data Hire at an AI Platform Rebuilding an Entire Industry's Back Office
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- Salary: £80,000 - £110,000
- Location: Victoria, central London. 4 days a week on-site, Wednesdays from home
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There's a particular kind of frustration that comes from watching an entire industry run on spreadsheets, phone calls and email chains long after the technology to fix it exists. That's the gap this company is closing. They've built an AI assistant that takes over the operational grind for property managers, letting agents and build-to-rent teams: the compliance chasing, the maintenance coordination, the scheduling, the endless admin that eats up most of a property manager's week. Pilot customers are already live across thousands of units, and the feedback has been strong enough that the business is now gearing up for its next funding round.
The team sits at 20-30 people globally, with engineering at around 13 and mostly remote outside the core London group. It's a flat set-up: leads are simply the engineers who've earned it, and everyone reports into the Head of Engineering. Data hasn't had a dedicated owner yet, which is exactly why this role exists. You'd be the first senior data hire, building the architecture, tooling and standards from a blank page, and laying the groundwork for the data team that comes after you.
Day to day you'll be architecting and scaling the systems behind the AI product: real-time pipelines, analytics infrastructure, vector databases and the data workflows that feed the machine learning side of the platform. You'll work closely with the AI and backend engineers to make sure the platform can handle serious volumes of operational data reliably, and you'll have a genuine say in the technical architecture decisions that shape where this goes next.
What They're Looking For (Non-Negotiables)
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- 7+ years in data engineering or backend engineering
- Strong track record designing and building data pipelines and distributed data systems
- Relational databases (PostgreSQL , MySQL or similar acceptable)
- NoSQL databases
- Vector databases used in modern AI systems
- Strong Python
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What You'll Work With
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- Apache Spark
- Apache Airflow
- Kafka
- Elasticsearch / OpenSearch
- MongoDB
- Vector databases such as Qdrant, Milvus or pgvector
- Pandas and Polars
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Nice to Haves
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- JavaScript / Node.js alongside Python
- Experience on AI or machine learning platforms
- Stream processing and event-driven architectures
- Cloud infrastructure (GCP, AWS or Azure)
- Time in a high-growth startup or early-stage company
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Why Join / Projects
This is the rare data role where you're not inheriting someone else's architecture; you're setting it. You'll define how data moves through an AI product from day one, from the pipelines feeding the model to the vector search underpinning retrieval, and you'll be the one making the calls on tooling and standards rather than working within someone else's. As the business scales, you're also the person who ends up mentoring and building out the team underneath you, so if you want architectural ownership and a real hand in shaping the function, not just a seat in it, this is that role.
If this role peaks your interest, please apply and I’ll give you a call if I think you’re suitable.
Lead Data Engineer | Python, Vector Databases & AI Data Pipelines | Early Data Hire at an AI Platform Rebuilding an Entire Industry's Back Office