Wave Group
Founding Data Engineer
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Data Engineer | AI startup, tier-one VC backed | London (hybrid, 2-3 days)
We're hiring for a fast-growing, VC-backed startup building AI-powered software for a safety-critical sector. This is currently the most business-critical technical hire on their roadmap, tied to a live enterprise deployment.
You'll be:
- Extracting data from legacy, semi-on-prem, non-uniform systems where APIs are often limited or non-existent, using non-standard ingestion routes rather than a clean API-first approach
- Building data models, pipelines, and last-mile integrations/connectors across genuinely fragmented, real-world infrastructure, not a clean greenfield stack
- Owning the back-end services those pipelines run on, including infrastructure as code
- Handling ETL, schema mapping, and reconciliation across legacy and modern systems side by side
- Working with zero-copy and data virtualisation approaches where direct extraction isn't possible
- Operating in short iterative cycles with high autonomy and no fixed playbook
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Core skills:
- Genuine experience getting data out of legacy or undocumented systems without relying on modern APIs, screen-scraping, UI automation, batch exports, direct database access, whatever the environment demands
- Production back-end services experience (Node/TypeScript or Python), including infrastructure as code (Terraform or Pulumi)
- Data modelling, legacy systems, backend-to-warehouse flows
- ETL, schema mapping, and reconciliation across old and new systems
- Solid AWS/cloud, end-to-end across the stack: VPC, ECS, Lambda, S3, KMS
- Security awareness: GuardDuty, SecurityHub or equivalent
- Data warehousing (Redshift, Glue, Synapse or Snowflake) and orchestration (Airflow, dbt or Prefect)
- Comfort with streaming/connectivity (Kafka, JDBC/ODBC) and data quality/schema tooling (Great Expectations, Pydantic, Avro/Protobuf)
Strong plus, not required:
- Regulated data experience (law enforcement, health, legal, fintech, government)
- Event or temporal data modelling
- Data platform vendor background (Snowflake, Databricks, Datadog)
- UI-based legacy ingestion tooling specifically
- Dual cloud and on-prem deployment experience
- Security-conscious development background
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What we're looking for:
A blend of startup pace and larger-company depth. Comfortable owning ambiguity, but able to handle complex, regulated environments
Compensation:
- £70k–£120k base, DOE
- Early equity allocation, with a commitment to top up early joiners further
- Discretionary bonus once revenue begins
- Pension matching, private health and dental cover
- Hybrid working, London preferred, flexibility for strong senior candidates elsewhere in the UK provided they're well-connected and open to occasional travel
- Must-have: Able to attain security clearance (UK national or 3+ years continuous UK residency), security clearance required, no visa sponsorship, no exceptions on this one.
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