Lead Data Engineer - Founding Member (Contract, Full-Time) [HR208] (UK)
Smart Working Solutions · GB
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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 Apache Spark, Apache Airflow, Kafka, and Elasticsearch or OpenSearch is highly desirable.
- Experience with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and vector databases such as Qdrant, Milvus or pgvector is highly desirable.
- Experience with Python data-processing libraries such as Pandas or Polars is highly desirable.
Skills
- Python
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- NoSQL databases
- Apache Spark
- Apache Airflow
- Kafka
- Elasticsearch
- OpenSearch
- MongoDB
- Qdrant
- Milvus
- pgvector
- Pandas
- Polars
- GCP
- AWS
- Azure
Location
- Remote
Work Type
- Full-time
- Long-term
- Remote-first
Experience Level
- Lead
- 7+ years of professional experience
About the Company
- 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.