Lead Data Engineer - Founding Member (Contract) [HR208] (UK)
The Lead Data Engineer will architect and scale data infrastructure for an AI-powered property management platform, managing real-time pipelines, vector databases, and ML workflows. As the first senior data hire, this role involves defining the technical stack, engineering standards, and data strategy while collaborating with AI and product teams.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- London
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Lead
- Employment
- Contract
- Experience
- 7+ years
- Category
- Data engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 7+ years of professional experience, with the majority in dedicated data engineering roles
- Strong experience designing and building data pipelines and distributed data systems
- Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred, MySQL or similar acceptable)
- Experience with NoSQL databases
- Experience with vector databases used in modern AI systems
- Strong programming experience in Python
- Demonstrated ability to make and justify architectural decisions
- Experience building scalable backend systems
- Experience designing data models and storage architectures
- Strong understanding of data processing performance and optimisation
Nice to have
- Experience with Apache Spark, Apache Airflow, Kafka, and Elasticsearch or OpenSearch
- Experience with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and vector databases such as Qdrant, Milvus or pgvector
- Experience with Python data-processing libraries such as Pandas or Polars
- Experience working on AI or machine learning platforms
- Familiarity with stream processing and event-driven architectures
- Experience with cloud infrastructure such as GCP, AWS or Azure
- Experience working in high-growth startups or early-stage companies
Full description
About Smart Working
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.
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.
This role requires you to be in the office 4 days / week.
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.