Data Engineer

About Native

Native is a VC-backed AI startup building the world’s most accurate AI for database reasoning. This is hard.

This is an unsolved problem that, once solved, will change how every enterprise operates.

We recently published our results, achieving rank #1 on the industry-standard benchmark.

Our research team is based in London.

Everyone has high agency, is obsessed with the problem we are solving, embraces the intensity of a 6-day week, and has the ambition to build something world-changing.

We are exceptional engineers and researchers taking a novel approach to accurate database reasoning.

About the role

This is a founding Data Engineer role, with the opportunity to shape our data and backend architecture from day one.

• Productionise research into robust, scalable data and backend systems
• Design and build data pipelines and APIs used by internal systems and customers
• Work deeply with databases (SQL, complex schemas, real-world, messy enterprise data)
• Design and operate data ingestion, transformation, and validation workflows
• Own scaling, performance, reliability, and correctness of data systems
• Design for observability, reproducibility, and data quality
• Think through edge cases, failure modes, and system boundaries in real-world data
• Help shape the data and backend architecture of the company from its earliest days

Required experience

• Strong experience with Python in production data or backend systems, plus familiarity with at least one additional backend language (e.g. Rust, Java, Go)
• Experience building and running production data systems (pipelines, storage layers, APIs)
• Deep comfort working with SQL, schemas, and complex relational data
• Experience with real-world data issues: missing data, inconsistencies, schema drift, scale
• Comfortable turning ambiguous research ideas into reliable data infrastructure
• Solid understanding of APIs, databases, and distributed systems
• Engineering taste: you care about clarity, correctness, and trade-offs
• High ownership mindset. You ship, you own, you improve

Why join us

This is a rare chance to join a founding team operating at the frontier of AI, with the resources to win.

• Impact: You will help push the frontier of AI-native data systems in an under-explored, massively valuable domain
• Team: A small, collaborative, world-class research and engineering team based in central London
• Founding-level equity + competitive salary: Meaningful ownership alongside a salary that lets you focus on building something great
• Direction: Shape the data foundations of a new class of AI system from day one

Culture

At Native, we look for people with exceptional engineering ability who want to win.

Everyone loves building and is ambitious enough to want to change how the world operates for the better.

• We run towards hard problems
• We are creative problem solvers who keep going until we find the underlying principle
• We build systems that must be correct, robust, and trusted
• If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, are intrinsically motivated, and want to have a huge impact, we are a great fit