Data Engineer (Staff - Frontier)

An opportunity to work on frontier AI with a top-tier engineering team. To meaningfully contribute toward work that has far reaching impact. Our client is a well-backed frontier AI company building next generation systems.

It's a business that is growing fast but selectively. The data platform is what will fuel substantial further growth and it needs senior people to own it.

You've built data platforms at scale and you're happy when the pipeline you own is the reason a team can move fast and be impactful.

You think like a software engineer who went deep on data, not a data analyst who picked up Python.

You'll design and build the core data platform from the ground up - the ingestion, storage, and processing layers that everything else depends on. You'll take ownership of how data moves through the company: how it's collected at high volume, how it's validated, how it's served back to the teams who need it in a shape they can trust.

You'll turn messy, evolving needs into durable systems. The needs of a fast-moving research team can shift, so you'll build for change.

You'll set the standard for data quality and reliability at a company where the output is only as good as the data feeding it. You'll own the hard calls on architecture, tooling, and trade-offs, and you'll be the person others reach for when something at the data layer has to be right.

Because the platform is early, you'll have unusual latitude - you're authoring the foundations, not maintaining someone else's.

• Deep experience building and owning data platforms or large-scale data infrastructure in production, not just consuming them
• Strong software engineering fundamentals - you write code other engineers rely on, and you think in systems, not scripts
• Fluency with modern data processing at volume (distributed processing, streaming or batch pipelines, warehousing/lakehouse patterns)
• A track record of taking loosely-defined problems and turning them into systems that hold up

Bonus:

• Exposure to ML or AI workloads and the data demands they bring
• Experience being early at a company or on a platform - comfortable with the ambiguity that comes with it.

You're pragmatic about tools and focused on outcomes. You've been the owner before, not just a contributor - you know what it takes to be accountable for the layer that everyone else depends on. You move fast without leaving a mess, and you'd rather build the thing right once than three times badly.

Based in the UK. This role does not offer visa sponsorship, so you'll need existing right to work in the UK.

Very competitive salary and meaningful equity.