Founding Data Engineer
Founding Data/ Platform Engineer
Contract - 6 months with a potential for permanent
Rate - £700-800/ day
Outside IR35
Remote - with agreed regular collaboration days in London
Start date - within 1 month
The company
A seed-stage start-up building a structured data product for a large, established industry. The product helps decision-makers assess whether something is worth committing serious time and capital to — earlier, and with better evidence than is currently possible.
The founder has scaled a £100m+ technology company in the same sector before. Design partners are live, the first deployment is underway, and the company is backed by aligned investors. Small team, real commercial pressure.
The technical challenge
Underneath the product is a large, versioned spatial reasoning system with strict provenance requirements. The current stack is SQL and Python. You are coming in at the point where architecture decisions matter most.
The core complexity: a single question is straightforward. Scaling to 60–100 external data pipelines is where the hard thinking is. The platform needs to be flexible without being over-engineered for the stage of the company.
The store is PostGIS-based and bitemporal.
What you will own
The technical architecture from day one: ingestion architecture, bitemporal store, versioned API surface, observability and more.
Roughly 70% hands-on engineering, 30% architecture decisions.
Essential skills
- Strong backend and platform engineering
- Production PostgreSQL or equivalent relational database experience
- API design and typed contracts
- Data pipeline design, ingestion, and operational reliability
- CI, observability, and deployment discipline
- End-to-end capability across platform, infrastructure, and cloud
- An AI-first engineering workflow that has materially changed your speed and output — you should be able to explain where it helps, where it fails, and how you preserve correctness
Desirable skills
- PostGIS or serious geospatial data experience
- Bitemporal, event-sourced, or audit-heavy data systems
This is a super rare, day one role - please get in touch to find out more