Location: UK or Portugal

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Permanent

About YLD:

Our goal is to help our clients keep moving forward. We work with them to build the skills and capabilities they need to stay ahead of the competition, and we know our success only happens when they succeed. We’re a team of curious, talented people, and we’re committed to making YLD a place where great people want to work, grow, and stay. We’re a remote-first consultancy specialising in software engineering, product design, and data. Our teams are based across London, Lisbon, and Porto, and we create digital solutions that continue to deliver value long after our work is done.

About the role:

As a Senior Data Engineer, you’ll be part of a client team building innovative products. We expect you to be curious, passionate, driven, and enthusiastic. You’ll be proficient at problem-solving, and crafting scalable, resilient, and fault-tolerant architectures. You’ll be an effective communicator and a team player. You and your team will move in a fast-paced engineering environment, achieving outstanding results and delivering exciting projects.

About you:

A YLD Senior Data Engineer is a highly skilled engineer who spans across data engineering and analytics engineering, and knows where the boundaries sit. You've built pipelines and transformation layers. You've inherited messy data projects and made them good. You have opinions about how data teams should work and the humility to adapt them to context.

You have a real passion for the craft and are an active learner who gets excited by the variety that consultancy brings: different clients, different stacks, different problems.

Your day-to-day responsibilities will look like this:

• Delivering data work on client engagements: pipelines, transformation layers, models, and the infrastructure around them
• Adapting to different client contexts, legacy warehouse migrations, greenfield lakehouses, struggling transformation layers that need rescuing
• Defining and evolving our internal standards for data work: testing, documentation, project structure, code review
• Mentoring and growing data engineers across the company
• Showing up for client team moments (internal speakers, learning sessions, social events) to build strong working relationships.
• Contributing to proposals and helping shape engagements during the sales process
• Representing YLD externally through writing, speaking, and contributing to the wider data community.

You’ll have the following skills and experience:

• SQL as engineering: You write SQL that's reviewable, testable, and performs at scale. You understand query planning, engine quirks, and how materialisation choices affect cost and performance
• Python for data: You write typed, testable Python for pipelines and tooling. You've built and maintained production data systems, not just notebooks
• Data modelling: You've made deliberate choices between dimensional, Data Vault, normalised, and denormalised designs. You can explain those trade-offs in terms of flexibility, query performance, and maintainability
• Transformation architecture: You design transformations that are idempotent, incremental, and dependency-aware. You think in DAGs, not scripts
• Pipeline design: You understand batch, streaming, and micro-batch trade-offs. You consider latency, complexity, cost, and reprocessability. And choose the right approach for the problem
• Data testing: You write tests as code, schema contracts, assertions, and transformation logic. You know what to catch at build time vs. defer to observability
• Data observability: You treat data reliability like site reliability. Measurable indicators, alerting, incident response, and root cause analysis
• CI/CD for data: You version, test, and deploy pipelines like software. Environment promotion, rollback strategies, and infrastructure as code for reproducible environments
• Data governance: You've implemented lineage, cataloguing, sensitive data classification, or access control. Not just built pipelines, but made them auditable and secure
• Cost-conscious: You've optimised warehouse spend, storage strategies, or job efficiency. You treat compute as a resource to manage, not ignore
• Platform fluency: You've worked across the modern stack. Orchestration (Airflow, Dagster), warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks), ingestion (Fivetran, Airbyte, custom), and transformation (dbt, Spark)
• Cross-functional fluency: You translate engineering constraints into business terms and negotiate realistic commitments

You’ll be:

• Self-motivated and proactive
• Comfortable with ambiguity, experimentation, and iteration
• Collaborative by default. You work well in teams and across teams
• Analytical and detail-oriented in your approach to problems
• Comfortable context-switching across clients, stacks, and problem types
• Willing to shape engagements, not just deliver them: contributing to proposals, scoping, and client relationships
• Active in the wider data community: writing, speaking, or open-source contribution
• Genuinely committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion

Benefits you'll get:

• Company Private Health care
• Enhanced fully paid maternity and paternity leave for up to 6 months
• Company’s Pension Scheme (UK Only)
• 25 days annual holiday (excluding Public Holidays)
• £2000/€2000 annual allowance for Training/Conferences
• £300/€300 annual allowance for additional hardware
• Wellbeing & Performance Support via Oli including Therapy and Coaching
• Discretionary Bonus (depending on Company performance and results)
• Company laptop
• Generous referral schemes

Our typical Recruitment Process looks like this:

• 1st Interview with someone from the Talent team (30-45 Minutes)
• Technical Interview with our Senior Developers (90 Minutes)
• Call with the Head of Engineering (60 Minutes)

Get a glimpse of what it's like working at YLD! 🤳

Check out our LinkedIn page

We live and breathe our values, and know you will too:

• Growing every day
• Including everyone
• Relationships built on honesty and ethics
• Inspiring solutions
• Winning together

We’re an equal-opportunity employer and value diversity in all its forms. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, pregnancy or maternity, age, marital status, or disability. We also offer a remote-first working environment, with flexible working and work–life balance as standard for all employees.

MUST HAVE:

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering within fast-paced, cloud-native environments
• Deep expertise in Python, SQL, Docker, and AWS (S3, Glue, Kinesis, Athena/Presto)
• Experience building and managing scalable ETL pipelines and data lake infrastructure
• Familiarity with distributed systems, Spark, and data quality best practices
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills to support BI, analytics, and engineering teams

EXPERIENCE: 5+ years of data engineering experience in an AWS-based environment where data powers decision-making across product, marketing, and operations.

YOUR ROLE

Lead scalable data engineering efforts that empower cross-functional teams with reliable, timely, and actionable data, ensuring Launch Potato’s analytics and business intelligence infrastructure fuels strategic growth.

OUTCOMES

• Build and optimize scalable, efficient ETL and data lake processes that proactively catch issues before they impact the business
• Own the ingestion, modeling, and transformation of structured and unstructured data to support reporting and analysis across all business units
• Partner closely with BI and Analytics to deliver clean, query-ready datasets that improve user acquisition, engagement, and revenue growth
• Maintain and enhance database monitoring, anomaly detection, and quality assurance workflows
• Serve as the internal point of contact for reporting infrastructure—delivering ad hoc data analyses and driving consistent data integrity
• Drive adoption and advancement of Looker dashboards by ensuring robust and scalable backend data support
• Contribute to the future of Launch Potato’s data team by mentoring peers and shaping a high-performance, quality-first engineering culture

COMPETENCIES

• Data Engineering Mastery: Demonstrates technical excellence in building data pipelines, troubleshooting distributed systems, and scaling infrastructure using AWS and open-source tools
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Communicates clearly across technical and non-technical teams, translating business needs into robust data solutions
• Proactive Ownership: Operates with a strong sense of accountability; identifies and solves data issues independently and efficiently
• Quality-Driven Execution: Holds a high bar for data accuracy, auditability, and documentation throughout all systems and workflows
• Strategic Thinking: Anticipates how data infrastructure impacts wider company OKRs and proactively suggests improvements and innovations
• Growth Mindset: Seeks out opportunities to elevate team capabilities, mentor others, and stay ahead of evolving best practices in data engineering

MUST HAVE:

• 5+ years of experience in data engineering within fast-paced, cloud-native environments
• Deep expertise in Python, SQL, Docker, and AWS (S3, Glue, Kinesis, Athena/Presto)
• Experience building and managing scalable ETL pipelines and data lake infrastructure
• Familiarity with distributed systems, Spark, and data quality best practices
• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills to support BI, analytics, and engineering teams

EXPERIENCE: 5+ years of data engineering experience in an AWS-based environment where data powers decision-making across product, marketing, and operations.

YOUR ROLE

Lead scalable data engineering efforts that empower cross-functional teams with reliable, timely, and actionable data, ensuring Launch Potato’s analytics and business intelligence infrastructure fuels strategic growth.

OUTCOMES

• Build and optimize scalable, efficient ETL and data lake processes that proactively catch issues before they impact the business
• Own the ingestion, modeling, and transformation of structured and unstructured data to support reporting and analysis across all business units
• Partner closely with BI and Analytics to deliver clean, query-ready datasets that improve user acquisition, engagement, and revenue growth
• Maintain and enhance database monitoring, anomaly detection, and quality assurance workflows
• Serve as the internal point of contact for reporting infrastructure—delivering ad hoc data analyses and driving consistent data integrity
• Drive adoption and advancement of Looker dashboards by ensuring robust and scalable backend data support
• Contribute to the future of Launch Potato’s data team by mentoring peers and shaping a high-performance, quality-first engineering culture

COMPETENCIES

• Data Engineering Mastery: Demonstrates technical excellence in building data pipelines, troubleshooting distributed systems, and scaling infrastructure using AWS and open-source tools
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Communicates clearly across technical and non-technical teams, translating business needs into robust data solutions
• Proactive Ownership: Operates with a strong sense of accountability; identifies and solves data issues independently and efficiently
• Quality-Driven Execution: Holds a high bar for data accuracy, auditability, and documentation throughout all systems and workflows
• Strategic Thinking: Anticipates how data infrastructure impacts wider company OKRs and proactively suggests improvements and innovations
• Growth Mindset: Seeks out opportunities to elevate team capabilities, mentor others, and stay ahead of evolving best practices in data engineering

Are you passionate about working with the most cutting-edge technologies, including AI, big data analytics, LLMs, data mining, and business intelligence (BI)? Are you looking to become part of a world-class engineering team? Do you aspire to contribute to a globally recognized, pre-IPO leader in technology?

As a Senior Software Engineer, you will contribute to the design and development of AI-driven architectures that power our next-generation intelligent customer engagement platforms. Your contributions will help shape AI-powered customer experiences, enhancing the intelligence and efficiency of our service platforms.

Job Responsibilities:

• Develop and enhance a cloud-based data foundation system and AI agent platform. This involves leveraging AI/ML models, applying prompt engineering techniques, and conducting data analysis across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Utilize technologies such as data and pattern mining, business intelligence (BI), and data transformation and processing.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including data scientists, software engineers, product managers, and business stakeholders, to deliver a high-performance, reliable, scalable service with assured AI quality.
• Contribute to architectural discussions, providing technical design input and ensuring alignment with the overall technology roadmap while adopting best practices effectively and independently.
• Participate in shaping the engineering roadmap, ensuring solutions are scalable and extensible while meeting business needs.
• Support and mentor junior engineers, fostering a collaborative and innovative development culture.
• Stay up-to-date with industry trends, emerging technologies, and advancements in AI and data engineering.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 5+ years of experience in backend development for cloud-based services, with a strong focus on scalability, reliability, and performance.
• Proficiency in Java, Python, C++, C#, Kotlin, Scala, or similar languages.
• Experience building and optimizing data-intensive services, including data processing, transformation, storage, and retrieval at scale.
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to design scalable solutions for AI-driven services.
• Strong written and verbal English communication skills.
• Prior experience with data platforms and/or AI services is highly desirable.
• Experience working with distributed data platforms and modern data architectures, such as Apache Spark, Databricks, Kafka, Delta Lake, or similar is a desirable.
• Experience in data science and practical experience applying AI/ML models is a plus.

Additional Notes:
This position will follow a hybrid work model.