Senior Data Platform Engineer; AWS, Databricks

London | Hybrid — 2 days per week in our London HQ | Full-time

Alto Software Group is a B2B SaaS company that powers more than half of all UK housing transactions each year. We create software solutions that connect businesses and consumers, delivering a one-stop shop for estate agents and home builders. Our goal is to drive efficiency, speed up transactions, reduce risk, and improve the end‑customer experience. While we're not a start‑up, we have a start‑up mindset and want our people to operate with this mindset so that we can achieve our ambitions.

We are looking for a Senior Data Platform Engineer to take on the hardest parts of scaling our data platform which powers both internal and external analytics solutions, agentic AI workflows and wider engineering systems. We’re investing heavily in migrating workloads and services away from legacy infrastructure, as well as building repeatable and resilient data processing pipelines for these use cases.

• Own the reliability and performance of our data lakehouse as it scales, taking the lead on the operational problems that don't have an obvious answer.
• Build the infrastructure and business logic behind our data commercialisation products, partnering with product and commercial teams to turn data into revenue.
• Design the abstractions, blueprints and reusable templates that let service and analytics teams work with data safely and consistently, from ingestion through to storage and access — and make them good enough that teams choose them.
• Lead the data side of modernising our legacy monolithic SQL Server database: extracting into the lakehouse and parallel data stores, introducing retention policies, and migrating to modern SQL frameworks.
• Write and optimise ETL processes and contribute to data modelling for both internal analytics and external‑facing data products.
• Take work from ambiguous problem statements through design, build and deployment, and stay accountable for it in production.
• Raise the technical bar on how we build — reviewing designs, challenging decisions, and improving our engineering practices as you go.

• Deep, hands‑on experience building and running production data platforms and products
• A good level of experience in Python (particularly pyspark) for building data pipelines
• Strong AWS and Terraform experience, with infrastructure‑as‑code as your default way of working rather than something you've picked up.
• Substantial experience with a modern lakehouse or warehouse platform — Databricks ideally, or Snowflake/Big Query — including the performance, cost and governance decisions that come with running one at scale.
• Real production experience with Fivetran, dbt, or equivalent ingestion and transformation tooling.
• Kafka or similar streaming systems in production, and the judgement to know when event‑driven is the right answer and when it isn’t.
• Strong SQL and sound data modelling instincts, plus experience working with large legacy relational estates and the constraints they bring.
• Comfort with container orchestration (ECS, Kubernetes) and how data workloads actually behave in production.
• A platform mindset — you take as much satisfaction from the paved road as from the pipeline that runs on it.

There's always room to grow and learn with our roles — please don't be put off if you don't have all of these. It's more important that you're passionate about improving the home moving and owning experience for everyone.

We believe in using the right tool for the job. Our current stack includes:

Data Platform:
Databricks, dbt, Fivetran

Languages:

Python, SQL

Databases: SQL Server (legacy, being modernised), plus lakehouse storage on S3

Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (Event Bridge,…