Founding Data Engineer
Posted Today by Inara
£800 Per day
Outside
Remote
London Area, United Kingdom
Summary: The Founding Data/Platform Engineer will play a crucial role in a seed-stage start-up focused on building a structured data product for a significant industry. This contract position, lasting six months with the potential for permanence, involves hands-on engineering and architectural decision-making in a remote setting with occasional collaboration in London. The role demands expertise in backend engineering, data pipeline design, and a strong understanding of spatial reasoning systems. The successful candidate will be responsible for the technical architecture from day one, ensuring the platform's flexibility and reliability as it scales.
Key Responsibilities:
- Own the technical architecture from day one, including ingestion architecture, bitemporal store, and versioned API surface.
- Engage in roughly 70% hands-on engineering and 30% architecture decisions.
- Design and implement data pipelines, ensuring operational reliability.
- Maintain CI, observability, and deployment discipline.
- Collaborate with a small team under commercial pressure to deliver a structured data product.
Key Skills:
- Strong backend and platform engineering experience.
- Production PostgreSQL or equivalent relational database experience.
- API design and typed contracts expertise.
- Data pipeline design and operational reliability skills.
- End-to-end capability across platform, infrastructure, and cloud.
- Experience with an AI-first engineering workflow.
- Desirable: PostGIS or serious geospatial data experience.
- Desirable: Knowledge of bitemporal, event-sourced, or audit-heavy data systems.
Salary (Rate): £800 daily
City: London
Country: United Kingdom
Working Arrangements: remote
IR35 Status: outside IR35
Seniority Level: undetermined
Industry: IT
Founding Data/ Platform Engineer Contract - 6 months with a potential for permanent
Rate - £700-800/ day Outside IR35
Remote - with agreed regular collaboration days in London
Start date - within 1 month
The company
A seed-stage start-up building a structured data product for a large, established industry. The product helps decision-makers assess whether something is worth committing serious time and capital to — earlier, and with better evidence than is currently possible. The founder has scaled a £100m+ technology company in the same sector before. Design partners are live, the first deployment is underway, and the company is backed by aligned investors. Small team, real commercial pressure.
The technical challenge
Underneath the product is a large, versioned spatial reasoning system with strict provenance requirements. The current stack is SQL and Python. You are coming in at the point where architecture decisions matter most. The core complexity: a single question is straightforward. Scaling to 60–100 external data pipelines is where the hard thinking is. The platform needs to be flexible without being over-engineered for the stage of the company. The store is PostGIS-based and bitemporal.
What you will own
The technical architecture from day one: ingestion architecture, bitemporal store, versioned API surface, observability and more. Roughly 70% hands-on engineering, 30% architecture decisions.
Essential skills
- Strong backend and platform engineering
- Production PostgreSQL or equivalent relational database experience
- API design and typed contracts
- Data pipeline design, ingestion, and operational reliability
- CI, observability, and deployment discipline
- End-to-end capability across platform, infrastructure, and cloud
- An AI-first engineering workflow that has materially changed your speed and output — you should be able to explain where it helps, where it fails, and how you preserve correctness
Desirable skills
- PostGIS or serious geospatial data experience
- Bitemporal, event-sourced, or audit-heavy data systems
This is a super rare, day one role - please get in touch to find out more