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Senior Data Engineer

LB820
  • £90,000 - £100,000
  • London Area

Senior Data Engineer

We're hiring a Senior Data Engineer to take technical ownership of a modern, AWS-native data platform, spanning everything from raw data ingestion and transformation to building scalable, reliable data pipelines that power production machine learning and AI systems.


This is a hands-on, high-autonomy role within a lean engineering team, where you'll work directly with senior technical leadership and have a genuine say in how the data architecture and platform evolve.


The Engineering Challenge

You'll own and evolve an AWS-native data environment, improving the reliability, scalability and performance of existing data infrastructure while building the foundations for future ML and AI initiatives.


The current stack includes:

  • Data Engineering: Apache Iceberg, Kafka, Parquet and Amazon Athena
  • Cloud Infrastructure: AWS-native data lake architecture, data ingestion, processing and storage
  • Architecture: AWS-based data lake (~5TB), with opportunities to modernise pipelines, optimise performance and improve platform maturity
  • ML & AI Integration: Supporting production ML workflows through SageMaker, with future opportunities around GenAI and LLM-powered diagnostic capabilities


What You'll Own

  • Designing, building and maintaining scalable, production-grade data pipelines across batch and streaming workloads
  • Evolving the AWS data lake architecture, improving data quality, reliability, performance and accessibility
  • Building and optimising data ingestion, transformation and processing workflows using modern data engineering technologies
  • Working directly with data scientists, ML engineers and architects to ensure reliable, high-quality data is available for production ML systems
  • Influencing architectural decisions, establishing engineering best practices and shaping the next generation of data infrastructure


What We're Looking For

  • Strong hands-on experience building and operating production data engineering systems
  • Deep familiarity with AWS and cloud-native data architectures
  • Strong Python and SQL skills, with solid software engineering fundamentals
  • Experience designing and maintaining scalable ETL/ELT pipelines, data lakes or modern lakehouse architectures
  • Understanding of distributed data processing, streaming architectures and data pipeline optimisation
  • Someone who enjoys end-to-end ownership, technical problem-solving and working without layers of bureaucracy
  • Experience with Apache Iceberg, Kafka, Parquet or Athena is highly desirable, while exposure to SageMaker or ML infrastructure is a bonus - production data engineering expertise is the priority.
Anna Heneghan Head of Machine Learning & AI Recruitment

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