Data Engineer

Wave Group; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Wave Group is building an operating system for UK police forces, and this role owns the data engineering layer, turning disparate legacy data into a coherent, secure fabric across multiple forces. You will build robust pipelines to ingest, reconcile, and normalise data from varied sources while maintaining strict data governance.

You will work on ETL/ELT pipelines, schema mapping, and data anonymisation alongside a small elite team.

Qualifications

• Proven experience with sensitive PII or health-equivalent data in a regulated environment.
• Comfort with messy legacy enterprise systems and fragmented infrastructure.
• ETL/ELT pipeline development and schema mapping at scale.
• Strong Python and SQL abilities.
• Experience with AWS and IaC (Pulumi or Terraform).

Responsibilities

• Own the data engineering layer, building pipelines to ingest, reconcile, and normalise data from fragmented legacy systems across police forces.
• Implement schema reconciliation and event-record joins supporting core product features.
• Develop data anonymisation and synthesis pipelines in a highly regulated environment.
• Model event sequences and temporal data across datasets.
• Collaborate closely with the Chief AI Scientist, Head of Software and founding engineers.

Skills

Python

SQL

AWS

Pulumi

Terraform

IaC

Tools

AWS

Pulumi

Terraform

Job description

Location: ideally (close to) London, but would consider remote

VISA sponsorship is NOT available

This is a rare one. 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.

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)

Strong signals:

• Background in NHS Trust data engineering, police systems, government, or civil service data infrastructure
• 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.