Data Platform Engineering Lead

Reflection AI; Greater London; On-site; GBP 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Reflection AI is seeking a front-line technical leader in London to build, mentor, and grow the Data Platform team. You will guide the technical direction while staying hands-on, collaborating with research to enable rapid experimentation on a unified data layer.

You will drive ingestion, orchestration, storage, and data quality, building scalable pipelines and cost-efficient systems. This is a high-impact leadership role for a seasoned engineer who can mentor and code.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering experience delivering production-grade data pipelines.
• Staff/principal-level IC with leadership of 5–10 engineers.
• Proven ability to recruit, mentor, and grow data platform teams.
• Experience across ingestion/orchestration, storage engines, or data quality systems.
• Fluent with modern data stack and zero-to-production system builds.
• Excellent cross-functional collaboration with research and infrastructure teams.

Responsibilities

• Build, mentor, and grow a ~10-person data platform team.
• Define technical direction for ingestion, orchestration, compute, and storage.
• Partner with research and production to enable rapid experimentation.
• Establish data quality, lineage, and governance signals.
• Maintain cost and performance through guardrails and tuning.
• Participate in design reviews and critical architecture decisions.

Skills

Data engineering

Leadership

Team building

Communication

Modern data stack

Ingestion & orchestration

Storage & processing engines

Data quality

Tools

Spark

Flink

Beam

Airflow

Dagster

Kafka

Pub/Sub

Parquet

Iceberg

Delta Lake

BigQuery

Snowflake

Great Expectations

Job description

Reflection AI is seeking a front-line technical leader in London to build, mentor, and grow the Data Platform team. You will guide the technical direction while staying hands-on, collaborating with research to enable rapid experimentation on a unified data layer.

You will drive ingestion, orchestration, storage, and data quality, building scalable pipelines and cost-efficient systems. This is a high-impact leadership role for a seasoned engineer who can mentor and code.