Senior Data Engineer

• Employment type: Full-time

• Reporting to: Senior Engineering Manager

• Visa sponsorship: Must be UK-based. UK national or visa holder preferred, but sponsorship is not necessarily a deal breaker

• Salary: £75,000 - £90,000

• Location/working pattern: Hybrid, London - 2 days a week in office

• Background checks: Due to the non-partisan nature of the work we do with global governments and partners, all employees need to pass background checks, verifying your identity, education (if relevant), work history, sanctions, criminal record, adverse financial history, and right to work. To ensure we maintain high standards of political neutrality, we also perform media and social media checks.

Apolitical's mission is to make governments smarter for people and the planet and we reach over 40 million public servants through our partnerships with governments globally. We are the largest global network for governments, used by 500,000+ public servants in 170 countries to find and share best practices and gain skills on critical topics from AI to climate change to emerging technologies.

Governments use Apolitical to solve public sector transformation challenges from AI augmentation to reskilling. We offer governments five interoperable components: research and analysis, workforce productivity tools, customisable training, vibrant learning communities and high-impact convenings. Everything we do is powered by our unique global network and real-time data.

Apolitical is becoming a multi-module, AI-enabled platform for governments. More of our products now depend on data that is reliable, well governed and ready for AI, and our data estate is growing faster than our two-person data team can support.

Our data platform runs on Google Big Query, with dbt Core for transformation, Airflow 3 on Cloud Composer for orchestration, Airbyte and custom Python pipelines for ingestion, Terraform for infrastructure and Git Hub Actions for CI/CD. Some pipelines write back into live products, so a bad run can reach public servants, not just a dashboard.

As a Senior Data Engineer, you will take ownership of the infrastructure that brings data into our warehouse, keeps it moving reliably and makes it safe to use. Your immediate mandate is to increase what our data team can deliver by strengthening ingestion, data quality and governance, and to lay the foundations for governed self-serve and natural language querying.

This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role with real ownership of technical decisions. You will work closely with the data team and Engineering, acting as the technical bridge between them, and with Product on the data behind our AI features.

You will:

• Own ingestion and integration – bring data into Big Query from a varied source estate, including product databases, Contentful, Hub Spot, Notion and LLM tracing tools, using Airflow, Airbyte and Python pipelines that fail loudly rather than silently.

• Run the data platform – operate orchestration, Terraform-managed infrastructure, containerised workloads and day-to-day Big Query administration, including performance and cost.

• Write data back safely – own reverse-ETL pipelines from Big Query into live systems such as Hub Spot, Postgres and Pinecone, with safeguards that stop a bad run reaching users.

• Govern sensitive data – apply and extend role-based access control, column-level policy tags, PII conventions, retention and lineage, so our handling of public servants' data meets UK GDPR and partners' residency requirements.

• Model data for self-serve and AI – extend our 600+ model dbt project and design the semantic layer that lets Product, Partnerships and Delivery and other teams query governed data, including in natural language.

• R…