Staff / Principal Data Engineer, Platform (up to £240k)

This role is with one of Dex's trusted partner companies. We work closely with their teams to truly understand their culture, goals, and what they're looking for, so we can match you with the right opportunity and give you context about the role before you commit to a process.

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The role

The next generation of AI won't learn from static datasets. It will learn through experience. This stealth lab builds interactive, resettable digital environments where AI agents navigate software, complete tasks, fail, and improve through trial and error. Data here isn't a supporting analytics function; it's the fundamental input for building increasingly capable AI systems.

You'll join the Platform team as a Staff or Principal Data Engineer, owning the technical direction for significant areas of data infrastructure. This is a deeply hands-on individual contributor role, combining software and data engineering with architectural leadership. You won't just deliver pipelines; you'll recognise underlying technical problems, set direction, and create leverage for the wider engineering organisation. Expect to define scalable approaches to data acquisition, processing, and integration, building infrastructure for quality, security, and privacy, and establishing patterns for others to build on.

The work

• Design and implement scalable data acquisition, ingestion, processing, and integration systems for large, experiential datasets.
• Build and evolve core infrastructure for data quality, sanitisation, security, and privacy across the platform.
• Establish reusable data patterns and frameworks, enabling other engineers to build on robust foundations rather than solving problems independently.
• Identify architectural limitations in existing data approaches and lead the technical transition to more scalable, resilient solutions.
• Provide hands-on technical direction and mentorship, staying close to code, production systems, and debugging.

What You Bring

• Significant experience building data-intensive production systems, with a track record of defining and evolving architecture in real environments.
• Proven ability to lead major technical work as an individual contributor, influencing and coordinating engineers beyond your direct implementation.
• Strong judgement on distributed processing, storage, reliability, and operational complexity, demonstrated through consequential trade-offs.
• Deeply hands‑on, with strong debugging skills and production instincts, applying engineering judgement to modern AI tools.

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