Senior Data Engineer
First seen by Alion on Nov 3, 2026.
About Atom Learning
Our mission is to help every child reach their potential. We combine teacher-made content with technology, data science and machine learning to make personalised education accessible to every child.
Nearly half a million children have learned on Atom, answering more than 750 million questions. Around 1,900 schools use Atom, and Quest, our standardised assessment platform, has delivered more than 1.1 million assessments since September 2024. We’re 100+ people across 10 countries, remote-first, with an office in London.
The role
Data at Atom isn’t a reporting function. It powers products that families and teachers act on: predicted grades, adaptive learning, and the probability of exam outcomes. On our busiest days, more than a million new question responses flow through the platform.
You’ll own how that data is modelled and made available. The hard part is getting it right:
- the right grain;
- point-in-time correctness, so we can reconstruct a pupil’s score as it stood last term;
- builds that give the same answer every time they run;
- catching data quality problems before they reach a teacher’s dashboard.
You won’t be one of 30 data engineers. You’ll be our go-to data specialist in a small, cross-functional engineering team, setting the direction of how we model and move data. You’ll own problems end to end, often starting from a loosely defined product request. We expect you to make the call and explain your reasoning.
Our stack: CockroachDB for the application, then BigQuery, dbt, Airflow and pub/sub. Data flows both ways, into analytics and back into the product.
What you’ll do
- Design and build the data models behind customer-facing features
- Build and own reliable pipelines between our application, warehouse and product
- Shape the technical direction of our data platform and data modelling standards
- Improve testing, data quality and observability so others can trust the data
- Review other engineers’ code and designs critically, and push back when something won’t hold up
- Mentor engineers and raise data capability across the wider team
- Make data easier for engineers and teams to use safely
- Use AI tools throughout your work, with the judgement to know when they’re wrong
What you’ll need
- Significant experience designing, building and scaling production data pipelines and models in Python and SQL, including owning design decisions others build on
- Hands-on experience with a cloud data warehouse (ideally BigQuery) and dbt
- Strong data modelling instincts: you think about grain, history and idempotency by default
- A habit of looking for data quality issues rather than assuming the data is clean
- Experience leading technical decisions and reviewing others’ work: you’re comfortable challenging a design, not just spotting bugs
- Experience owning work end to end with a high degree of autonomy
- Fluent written and spoken English, and the ability to explain data problems to non-technical colleagues
- Confidence with AI tools, and the ability to explain and defend everything you ship
Nice to have
Airflow, CDC or event-driven pipelines (CockroachDB or Postgres), Tableau or Metabase, experience building data-powered product features.
If you have the core skills but not every tool on the list, apply. We care more about how you model data than which orchestrator you’ve used.
How we hire
1. An intro call with our People team
2. A take-home task: a small modelling problem in BigQuery.
3. A technical interview with members of the data team.
4. A final interview with our Engineering Director
Benefits
- 25 days’ holiday plus bank holidays and 3 days’ winter leave
- Annual L&D budget
- Private Medical Insurance
- EMI Options
- Enhanced Family Leave
- Monthly remote and in-person events in London
Commitment to equal opportunity
At Atom, diversity and inclusion is a priority, but also a necessity. To create a new standard for education across the world, we need a team of people with diverse perspectives so that we can challenge the status quo and reimagine learning experiences that work for everyone.
We’re committed to fostering an inclusive environment, where everyone can be themselves and have an impact. We encourage all applications irrespective of gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, age, nationality, marital status, and disability.