Staff Data Platform Engineer

Staff Data Platform Engineer
Large-scale data/Cloud infrastructure | ClickHouse / OLAP | Technical Leadership
No Sponsorship Option
London or Oxford, X2 per week
£100,000-£130,000

We're looking for a Staff Data Platform Engineer to take technical ownership of a large-scale analytical data platform, tackling complex infrastructure challenges and shaping the foundations for the next generation of AI-driven products.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who enjoys innovating at the limits of what data infrastructure can do. You'll lead platform architecture, drive performance and efficiency improvements, develop a scalable Data-as-a-Service offering, and help a small team deliver highly reliable systems.

The Role

• Large-scale data engineering: Design, optimise and scale multi-tenant ClickHouse or equivalent OLAP platforms, tackling complex challenges across sharding, replication, materialised views, query performance and cost efficiency.
• Platform reliability: Build automation, observability and intelligent capacity management to improve resilience, reduce operational overhead and enable data-intensive systems to scale efficiently.
• Data-as-a-Service: Shape the architecture of a secure, multi-tenant data platform, enabling immutable data releases, discoverability and efficient access to complex datasets.
• AI infrastructure: Build the data foundations that support agentic AI systems, working closely with ML engineers to enable secure, scalable and reliable access to platform data.
• Security by design: Establish robust tenant isolation, least-privilege access controls and credential management across the platform.
• Technical leadership: Set architectural direction, establish engineering standards, mentor other engineers and line-manage a small team while remaining hands-on with the technology.

What We're Looking For

• Deep expertise in ClickHouse or comparable OLAP technologies, ideally with experience operating multi-tenant analytical systems at significant scale.
• Strong understanding of database internals, query optimisation, distributed architectures, sharding and replication. Experience contributing to open-source database projects or working at source-code level would be highly advantageous.
• A proven track record building scalable, observable and resilient data platforms, with a focus on automation and operational efficiency.
• Experience developing data platforms as products, including multi-tenancy, secure data distribution, immutable releases and large-scale data discovery.
• An understanding of how to expose data securely to AI agents and other automated systems, including access controls, isolation and guardrails.
• Strong knowledge of platform security, secrets management and least-privilege principles.
• The ability to influence technical strategy, mentor engineers and lead a small team without stepping away from hands-on engineering.

The OpportunityThis is an opportunity to take ownership of a technically ambitious data platform, solve infrastructure problems at significant scale and influence the architecture underpinning data-intensive and AI-powered products.
We're looking for someone who leads through technical expertise, enjoys solving problems that don't have obvious answers, and wants to make a lasting impact on how a platform evolves.