Senior Data Platform Engineer

Senior / Staff Data Platform Engineer — AI & Data Platform Senior: $161,000–$184,000 + 15% bonus Staff: $170,000–$230,000 + 20% bonus We’re working with a leading AI and legal technology business that is building data infrastructure to support the next generation of intelligent products used by legal and financial professionals. The team is looking for Senior and Staff Data Platform Engineers to take ownership of the platforms, pipelines and backend infrastructure that ingest, process, store and serve large volumes of complex document and transaction data. This is a hands-on engineering role with significant architectural ownership. You’ll work across distributed systems, data pipelines, databases, cloud infrastructure and APIs, with the opportunity to influence how the platform evolves as the business scales. What you’ll be working on You’ll design and optimise data pipelines that ingest, transform and distribute large-scale document data, while building reliable backend services for storage, retrieval and processing. A key part of the role will be improving the underlying data platform — from database schema design, migrations and query optimisation through to scalability, reliability, security and governance. You’ll also work closely with AI and machine learning teams, providing the infrastructure required to support model training and inference at scale. At Staff level, you’ll have broader responsibility for setting technical direction and owning outcomes across the platform. You’ll act as a technical leader and platform architect, influencing architecture, driving cross-functional initiatives and helping engineers make better decisions around system design and engineering practices. What we’re looking for We’re looking for experienced software engineers with a strong background in data platforms, backend infrastructure or distributed systems. You’ll ideally bring: 7+ years of software engineering experience, with significant experience working on data platforms or backend infrastructureStrong Python experience, alongside another systems-oriented language where relevantExperience designing and building scalable APIs and distributed systemsStrong SQL and database knowledge across relational and/or NoSQL technologiesExperience with large-scale data technologies such as Spark, Hadoop or SnowflakeCloud experience across AWS, GCP or Azure, ideally alongside infrastructure-as-codeExperience with database migrations, data modelling and query optimisationAn understanding of data governance, privacy, security and complianceExperience with streaming technologies such as Kafka or Flink is beneficialExposure to ML/data pipelines or feature engineering platforms is also useful For the Staff position, we’re particularly interested in engineers who have moved beyond simply delivering technical tasks and have demonstrated ownership of technical direction, architecture and outcomes. You should be comfortable operating as a platform architect, influencing across teams and mentoring other engineers. The opportunity You’ll be joining a technically ambitious environment where data infrastructure sits directly underneath AI-powered products. The problems are genuinely large-scale and involve a mixture of document data, distributed systems, backend engineering, databases and cloud infrastructure. There’s also a strong emphasis on personal accountability — engineers are expected to own their outcomes, make decisions, drive initiatives forward and take responsibility for the direction of the systems they work on. If you’re a Senior or Staff-level engineer who enjoys solving complex data infrastructure problems and wants genuine architectural ownership, I’d be keen to speak.