{"id":2144765,"url":"https://alion.io/job/smartworkingsolutions-lead-data-engineer-founding-member-contract-hr208-uk","title":"Lead Data Engineer - Founding Member (Contract) [HR208] (UK)","company":{"id":3745,"name":"Smart Working Solutions","domain":"smartworkingsolutions.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/smartworkingsolutions","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":83,"open_postings":3,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.667,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":23,"computed_at":"2026-10-21T05:46:15Z"}},"role":"Data Science","role_family":"Data Science","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"contractor","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["London, United Kingdom","Milton Keynes, United Kingdom","Guildford, United Kingdom","Woking, United Kingdom"],"countries":["GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":107000,"max_usd":187000,"period":"year","method":"role_seniority_country_remote_cell","sample_n":34},"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"MySQL","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Airflow","optional":true},{"name":"Apache Kafka","optional":true},{"name":"AWS","optional":true},{"name":"Azure","optional":true},{"name":"ElasticSearch","optional":true},{"name":"GCP","optional":true},{"name":"Milvus","optional":true},{"name":"OpenSearch","optional":true},{"name":"Pandas","optional":true},{"name":"pgvector","optional":true},{"name":"Polars","optional":true},{"name":"Qdrant","optional":true},{"name":"Spark","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-08-20T07:40:52Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-08-20","last_verified_at":"2026-10-22T02:34:08Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":62,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":62},"description":"About Smart Working\nAt Smart Working, we believe your job should not only look right on paper but also feel right every day. This isn’t just another remote opportunity - it’s about finding where you truly belong, no matter where you are. From day one, you’re welcomed into a genuine community that values your growth and well-being. Our mission is simple: to break down geographic barriers and connect skilled professionals with outstanding global teams and products for full-time, long-term roles. We help you discover meaningful work with teams that invest in your success, where you’re empowered to grow personally and professionally.\nJoin one of the highest-rated workplaces on Glassdoor and experience what it means to thrive in a truly remote-first world.\nAbout the Role\nWe are looking for a Lead Data Engineer to build and lead the data infrastructure powering an intelligent AI assistant platform. This role will architect and scale the systems that power our AI products, from real-time data pipelines and analytics infrastructure to vector databases and machine learning data workflows.\nYou will work closely with AI engineers, backend engineers, and product teams to ensure our platform can process large volumes of operational data reliably and intelligently. You will define our data architecture, tooling, and engineering standards, and play a key role in building the foundations of the future data team.\nThis role requires you to be in the office 4 days / week.\nResponsibilities\nArchitect and build scalable data pipelines and infrastructure to support AI and product systems.\nDesign and maintain data ingestion, transformation and storage architectures for operational and AI workloads.\nDevelop and manage batch and real-time data pipelines.\nBuild and optimise systems for vector search, retrieval and machine learning data pipelines.\nEnsure data reliability, security and governance across the platform.\nCollaborate with AI and backend engineering teams to support training, inference and product features.\nImplement monitoring, observability and data quality frameworks.\nOptimise the performance of large-scale datasets and query systems.\nContribute to technical architecture decisions and long-term data strategy.\nAct as the founding data hire, defining culture, standards and the hiring bar for the data function as it scales.\nPartner directly with founders and product leadership to translate data capabilities into product decisions.\nRequirements\n7+ years of professional experience, with the majority of that experience in dedicated data engineering roles.\nStrong experience designing and building data pipelines and distributed data systems.\nExperience working with relational databases, with PostgreSQL preferred, although MySQL or similar is acceptable.\nExperience working with NoSQL databases.\nStrong programming experience in Python.\nDemonstrated ability to make and justify architectural decisions, rather than only implementing them.\nExperience building scalable backend systems.\nExperience designing data models and storage architectures.\nStrong understanding of data processing performance and optimisation.\nExperience with some of the following data frameworks and infrastructure technologies is highly desirable: 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