Lead Data Engineer

Lead Data Engineer — AI Startup, London | £130k+ | Equity | London | 4 days onsite

We're an early-stage, well-backed AI startup building an automation platform for a large, traditionally slow-moving UK industry. Live with pilot customers, strong early traction, scaling hard toward revenue this year.

We're hiring our first Lead Data Engineer. You'll own the data architecture from the ground up: real-time pipelines, analytics infra, and the vector/ML data workflows that power our AI product. This isn't maintaining someone else's system, you're building it.

What you'll be doing

• Architecting and building the data pipelines and infrastructure behind our AI product
• Designing ingestion, transformation and storage for both operational and AI workloads
• Building and optimising vector search and ML data pipelines
• Setting the data standards, tooling and hiring bar as the first data hire
• Working directly with the founders, not three layers removed from decisions

What you'll bring

• 7-10 years in data engineering, with real ownership of architecture decisions, not just execution
• Strong Python, plus experience with tools like Spark, Airflow, Kafka
• Comfortable across relational (Postgres), NoSQL, and vector databases (Qdrant, Milvus, pgvector, or similar)
• A background that includes time at a larger, more established tech company, ideally followed by a move into an early-stage or high-growth startup
• You like building things from nothing more than you like maintaining what already exists

Why this one's worth a look

• Genuinely the first data hire, no legacy mess to untangle
• Direct access to founders and real influence over the roadmap
• Meaningful equity in a company backed by serious investors
• A market that's ripe for disruption and a product that's already landing with customers

Sound like you? Get in touch, or drop me a message and I'll talk you through it properly.