Lead Data Engineer (Kafka/Kinesis)

Lead Data Engineer

Up to £100,000*Kafka or Kinesis required London (4 days onsite)This is a great opportunity to join a high-growth organisation where you can take ownership of building and architecting a greenfield data platform for an AI-driven product.THE COMPANY:This is an early-stage, venture-backed company building the operating system for modern property management through its AI platform. THE ROLE:You will take ownership of the entire data architecture, acting as the most senior individual contributor within Data Engineering. This is a hands-on leadership role focused on technical ownership rather than people management.Key responsibilities include:

• Designing and owning the company's data architecture from the ground up
• Building scalable batch and real-time data pipelines
• Developing data ingestion, storage, and transformation frameworks
• Supporting AI and machine learning infrastructure, including vector search systems
• Implementing data quality, monitoring, and observability practices
• Collaborating closely with AI, backend engineering, and product teams
• Optimising performance, scalability, and reliability of large datasets
• Influencing long-term technical strategy and laying foundations for the data function

YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE:You will bring strong capability in:

• Python development and building scalable distributed data systems
• Data architecture design and pipeline development
• Batch and streaming data processing
• Relational databases (PostgreSQL or similar)
• NoSQL and modern vector databases (e.g., Qdrant, Milvus, pgvector)

THE BENEFITS:You will receive a salary of up to £100,000 depending on experience.HOW TO APPLY:Please register your interest by sending your CV to Molly Bird via the apply link on this page.