Trust In SODA
Senior Data Engineer
Get notified of more jobs like this · No spam, ever
How your CV stacks up
Upload your CV to see how well it fits this job role
?%
Senior Data/ML Engineer – Contract Position – HIRING ASAP
Location: London Bridge – In office 2-3 days per week
Start Date: ASAP
Duration: 3-4 months with extension
Daily Rate: £400 - £450 per day outside IR35
Summary
You will sit with the Head of Data and the Lead Data Scientist/Engineer. You will be pointed at inputs and expected outcomes, then expected to design and build the path between them - including the data model – with light review.
The work still must be grounded: clear schemas, sensible storage layout, production-quality Python. It is not cowboy scripts, and it is not waiting for a backlog of tickets.
This is a bad fit if you mainly plug enterprise components together, wait for JIRA epics, or treat AI coding tools as a novelty. This is a good fit if you have built data/ML systems in a startup or small product team, you use Cursor/Copilot (or equivalent) as a normal part of shipping, and you can own a problem from messy source files to a running pipeline without being sequenced.
Reasons to use Rodeo
Start with a chat, not a search bar
Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.
It searches the market for you
Every day your agent scans the market matching roles against what actually matters to you, not just keywords on a CV.
Only hits
No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
Requirements
- Strong production Python
- Evidence of designing data models and schemas, not only consuming them
- Comfort operating with incomplete requirements: inputs and outcomes, then you fill in the middle
- Can take messy inputs and an expected outcome, then design schema + build the pipeline with light review
- Evidence of designing a production pipeline from messy source data, not just orchestrator config
- AI-assisted development as a default way of working, not a talking point
- Using AI coding tools (Cursor, Copilot or equivalent as a normal way of shipping
- 4+ years shipping data or applied ML systems in production
- Previous experience in a start-up or a small product team
Bonus Skills
- Dagster, or Airflow, or Prefect in production
- Data lakes / Parquet / S3
- Terraform or general cloud familiarity (infra is owned by another team)
- RAG, embeddings, or other LLM-adjacent pipelines
- Startup or small-team product delivery
Get help with your application
Your very own career expert that helps elevate your application to the next level.
Responsibilities
- Turn client data (APIs, CSVs, S3, messy operational exports) into reliable Python pipelines.
- Specify schemas and storage layout (Parquet on S3, layered / medallion-style) so the next person can extend the work.
- Orchestrate jobs in Python. We use Dagster; Airflow, Prefect, or well-structured Python jobs are fine.
- Work on AWS. You do not need to own Terraform, EKS, or networking.
- Use AI coding agents heavily, then stand behind the architecture and the data model.
- Shape approach with the rest of the data team: enough design to stay coherent, then execute at speed
Skills we’re not looking for
- Assembling warehouse / lakehouse platforms (Spark, Informatica, “I wired Airflow to the lake”)
- Writing TDDs and JIRA epics rather than shipping code
- Large bank / SI / programme delivery with little product ownership
- ML research / model-training CVs with no real-world data engineering
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London
Skills
Location