Lead Data Engineer

Lead Data Engineer

London (Hybrid) | Full-time | Up to £160K + equity

We're a fast-growing AI company in London looking for our first senior data hire to architect and lead the data infrastructure behind our AI platform, real-time pipelines, analytics, vector databases, and ML data workflows, setting the standards the whole future data team will be built on.

This is an individual contributor role: you'll be the senior technical owner of the data function, architecture, standards, and direction, not a route out of code into strategy or people management. The capability today is roughly 1.5 people, so it's started but not built; you're building it.

LLM-native experience is essential: vector retrieval, embeddings, evaluation workflows, and real-time agentic systems, not general data engineering with superficial LLM exposure.

Key Responsibilities:

• Architect and build scalable data pipelines and infrastructure for our AI and product systems
• Design data ingestion, transformation, and storage architectures across operational and AI workloads
• Develop and manage batch and real-time data pipelines
• Build and optimise vector search, retrieval, and ML data pipelines
• Own data reliability, security, and governance
• Implement monitoring, observability, and data quality frameworks
• Set the culture, sta...