Lead Data Engineer – Founding Member

🕒 August 20

🇬🇧 United Kingdom – Remote

⏱ Part Time

🟠 Senior

🚰 Data Engineer

👻 Ghost score 35%

What it means: how likely this posting is sitting open without active hiring.How to read it: 60% or higher means we think this is a ghost. Lower scores are less of a worry.How we score it: age, reposts, open roles vs team size, how fast jobs close, and whether pay is listed.Fine print: an estimate from public data, not a judgment of the company. Real jobs can score high, so treat it as a hint, not a fact.

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Smart Working

WebsiteLinkedInAll Job Openings

51 - 200 employees

💼 Consulting

🏥 Healthcare

📣 Marketing

Consulting • Healthcare • Marketing

Smart Working is a recruitment service specializing in sourcing and providing top-tier software developers from around the world to meet the needs of businesses. With a robust vetting process that includes technical assessments and background checks, Smart Working ensures that clients receive highly skilled developers adept in various programming languages and frameworks. The company focuses on flexible and remote hiring solutions, allowing businesses to efficiently scale their development teams while benefiting from significant cost savings.

📋 Description

• Architect and build scalable data pipelines and infrastructure supporting AI and product systems • Design and maintain data ingestion, transformation, and storage architectures for operational and AI workloads • Develop and manage batch and real-time data pipelines • Build and optimise vector search, retrieval, and machine learning data pipeline systems • Ensure data reliability, security, and governance across the platform • Collaborate with AI and backend engineering teams on training, inference, and product features • Implement monitoring, observability, and data quality frameworks • Optimise large-scale datasets and query systems • Contribute to technical architecture decisions and long-term data strategy • Act as the founding data hire, defining culture, standards, and hiring practices for the data function • Partner with founders and product leadership to translate data capabilities into product decisions

🎯 Requirements

• 7+ years of professional experience, with the majority in dedicated data engineering roles • Strong experience designing and building data pipelines and distributed data systems • Experience with relational databases; PostgreSQL preferred, with MySQL or similar acceptable • Experience with NoSQL databases • Strong programming experience in Python • Ability to make and justify architectural decisions • Experience building scalable backend systems • Experience designing data models and storage architectures • Strong understanding of data processing performance and optimisation • Experience with Apache Spark, Apache Airflow, Kafka, and Elasticsearch or OpenSearch highly desirable • Experience with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and vector databases such as Qdrant, Milvus or pgvector highly desirable • Experience with Python data-processing libraries such as Pandas or Polars highly desirable • Experience working on AI or machine learning platforms • Familiarity with stream processing and event-driven architectures • Experience with cloud infrastructure such as GCP, AWS or Azure • Experience working in high-growth startups or early-stage companies • Experience with vector databases used in modern AI systems

🏖️ Benefits

• Remote-first work environment • Genuine community focused on growth and well-being • Full-time, long-term roles are part of Smart Working’s mission, though this specific posting is marked part-time/contract