Senior Data Engineer

Base Pay Range

Direct message the job poster from Innova Recruitment

Co-Founder & Director | 15+ Years in Tech Recruitment | Building High-Performing Engineering, Data & IT Teams Across the UK & USA

Private Healthcare and Bonus

We’re hiring a Senior Data Engineer for a UK-based technology company operating at the intersection of healthcare and legal technology.

This role exists to build the core data platform that underpins AI and machine learning work. The business is moving beyond fragmented data and needs someone who can design and deliver a structured, secure and compliant data foundation that AI teams can rely on.

This is a greenfield role with real ownership.

The Role

You’ll be responsible for designing and building the company’s first centralised data platform, with a clear focus on enabling AI development rather than analytics or BI.

Working closely with AI Engineers and MLOps Engineers, you’ll ensure datasets are structured, versioned and reproducible so models can be trained, evaluated, monitored and retrained reliably.

This role is hands-on and requires someone comfortable making architectural decisions with minimal direction.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Designing and building a greenfield data architecture from scratch
• Creating scalable data pipelines for large, text-heavy and unstructured datasets
• Building ETL/ELT workflows that produce AI-ready datasets
• Implementing dataset versioning, reproducibility and data lifecycle management
• Supporting AI teams with training, validation and test data splits
• Embedding data quality checks, monitoring, lineage and drift detection
• Working closely with MLOps to support model monitoring and retraining
• Ensuring data privacy, security and compliance are built in from day one
• Using infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD practices for data pipelines

What They’re Looking For

• Strong experience as a Data Engineer in production environments
• Strong Python and SQL
• Experience building data platforms that directly support AI or ML teams
• Solid understanding of AI data lifecycles (datasets, versioning, drift, reproducibility)
• Experience with Azure-based data platforms
• Experience with containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Strong understanding of data governance, lineage and compliance
• Comfortable working independently and making technical decisions

This is not a BI or stakeholder reporting role.

They’re not looking for someone focused on dashboards, executive reporting or analytics platforms. The data platform exists primarily to support AI model development and monitoring.

Experience working with sensitive or regulated data is important.

Why This Role

• First Data Engineer in the business
• Ownership of tooling, standards and architecture
• Direct influence on how AI is delivered in production
• Opportunity to shape a wider data function over time

If this sounds like something you’d like to explore, feel free to apply or message directly for more detail.

Seniority level

Mid-Senior level

Employment type

Full-time

Job function

Information Technology, Engineering, and Other

Industries

Technology, Information and Media, Software Development, and IT Services and IT Consulting