Wave Group
Data Engineer
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Job Title: Founding Data Engineer
💰 Salary: £90-120k (DOE)
📍 Location: ideally (close to) London, but would consider remote
🚔 Industry: AI Infrastructure for UK Police
🛂 VISA sponsorship: is NOT available
This is a rare opportunity. A Sequoia and General Catalyst-backed startup is building the operating system for UK police forces — combining AI-powered investigation software with smart hardware to give officers real-time data and cut administrative burden.
Founded by a genuinely exceptional team: one founder is the youngest Chief Constable in UK history and previously bootstrapped and sold a PoliceTech product into every UK force in the country within 18 months. The other founder comes from sovereign wealth fund investing. The company has already signed pilots and has live on-site deployments running, with a small (7-person), high-calibre engineering team in London.
The role
This is the most business-critical hire in the company right now. You'll own the data engineering layer — building pipelines that ingest, reconcile, and normalise data from deeply fragmented legacy systems across different police forces. Every force runs different infrastructure: different clouds, different telephony systems, different software stacks, no consistent APIs. Your job is to make sense of all of it.
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This is explicitly not a greenfield role. The hard, valuable part of the work is operating without greenfield assumptions.
You'll work on:
- ETL/ELT pipelines extracting and normalising data from legacy operational platforms
- Schema reconciliation and event-record joins underpinning core product features
- Data anonymisation and synthesis pipelines for a highly sensitive, regulated environment
- Event-sequence and temporal data modelling across operational datasets
- Close collaboration with the Chief AI Scientist, Head of Software, and a Founding Engineer
What we're looking for
Must-have:
- Proven experience with sensitive PII or health-equivalent data in a regulated environment
- Genuine comfort with messy, legacy enterprise systems — fragmented infra, inconsistent schemas, limited or no APIs
- ETL/ELT pipeline development and schema mapping at scale
- Strong Python and SQL
- Experience with AWS and IaC (ideally Pulumi or Terraform)
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Strong signals:
- Background in NHS Trust data engineering, police systems, government, or civil service data infrastructure
- Enterprise integration experience (SAP, MuleSoft, Salesforce, Oracle)
- Time at a data platform vendor (Snowflake, Databricks, Datadog)
- Zero-copy or virtualisation-first architecture experience
- Multi-cloud fluency — every force is different, so cloud agnosticism matters here
Nice to have:
- Airflow, dbt, Spark, Kafka, or similar
- UI-based ingestion tooling for legacy systems without usable APIs
- Video or streaming data experience
Important:
This role requires UK national status or 3+ years of continuous UK residency, as security vetting is mandatory with no exceptions.
What this isn't:
If your experience is limited to clean, greenfield startup datasets, this probably isn't the right fit. The value here comes from comfort with complexity and legacy systems, not building on a pristine modern stack from day one.
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