Senior Data Engineer
Senior Data Engineer at Ceto, a maritime fleet-intelligence startup whose Watchkeeper platform predicts ship machinery failures from onboard sensor data. You own the data platform end to end — ingestion pipelines, large-scale databases, APIs, cloud infrastructure and internal tooling — mainly in Python with Docker and cloud (Azure preferred), hybrid from the London office.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- London, United Kingdom
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Senior
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Data engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Experience in an early-stage startup; comfortable working at speed, context switching and turning ambiguous problems into delivered solutions
- AI-native: uses modern AI tools to boost productivity and knows when to trust agents vs. do work by hand
- Strong Python skills and its data libraries (pandas/polars/numpy)
- Experience with large datasets (billions of data points) and maintaining databases at that volume
- Enjoy learning new technologies and working across the full breadth of a platform
- Built production APIs with modern frameworks (Flask/Fast/Express/H3) and understand best practices e.g. authentication and authorization
- Experience with cloud platforms (Azure preferred, AWS, GCP) and shipped production systems to the cloud
- Understands engineering best practices with exposure to CI/CD and DevOps
- Experience with containerised applications and Docker
- Comfortable in ambiguous problem spaces and able to weigh trade-offs quickly
- Good communicator who adapts level of technicality to the audience
Nice to have
- Experience in a polyglot codebase (TypeScript preferred) and multiple languages
- Exposure to distributed systems / microservices
- Mechanical engineering background; understands engine sensor data
- Experience with MongoDB or other NoSQL databases
- Experience working directly with clients to define product/feature/fix needs
Full description
Ship maintenance is broken. We're fixing it.
Ceto is a fleet intelligence company. Our platform, Watchkeeper, takes the high-frequency sensor data ships already generate and predicts machinery failures before they happen — on one vessel we flagged a developing fuel-system issue days before a critical failure, on a ship earning $48,000 a day. No new hardware, no rip-and-replace: if an owner is already capturing data, we can have a full fleet live in days. We're deployed across fleets owned by major global shipowners, and we sell directly to the ship owners and operators who feel every day of unplanned off-hire on their P&L.
We're a small, senior team - our CEO spent eight years at sea as a marine engineer before founding the company; we’re backed by investors including Dynamo Ventures who led our $4.8m seed round, and we're compounding fast which is exactly why we need you.
What we're doing
We're reshaping maritime. It's an industry that's incredibly important and serves as the backbone of global trade, moving $14 trillion of cargo each year. Despite its significance, the industry remains one of the final frontiers of digitalisation.
Ceto provides the operational intelligence layer that technical teams rely on for mission-critical decision making. By capturing and analysing high-frequency data from commercial ships, Ceto monitors the condition of the machinery onboard. Through anomaly detection and degradation forecasting we predict mechanical failures ahead of time and guide decision making for our customers. Our analytics are served as insights through our dashboard, preventing costly breakdowns, loss of hire events and reducing operational risk.
The role
We’re hiring for a data engineer who has experience building and maintaining production software across the full stack. This role requires you to wear many hats, operating across the full breadth of our production tech: APIs, ingestion pipelines, databases, infrastructure, architecture, orchestration, tooling and the occasional dash of front end. You will fundamentally own all the technology that supplies our predictive analytics with data and serve those analytics to the customer.
Your responsibilities will include:
- Owning the data platform, from the database through to the vessel sensor assignment
- Designing and building systems and pipelines for transporting data efficiently
- Designing and implementing data structures / schemas that serve our product needs
- Building and maintaining APIs
- Maintaining and improving existing services and products such as our emissions engine
- Interfacing with our clients’ technical teams to understand their technical requirements
- Building and improving internal tools that improve developer experience
- Working closely with our data scientists to supply the data they require