Founding Data Engineer

Wave Group; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 100,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity equity

Discretionary bonus

Pension matching

Private health and dental

Hybrid working

Job summary

Wave Group is recruiting a Data Engineer to join an AI startup backed by tier‑one VC in London. The role blends startup speed with scale, focused on integrating legacy data into live enterprise deployments.

You will own backend data pipelines, build models, and work across on‑prem and cloud systems, with strong emphasis on security and governance, while enjoying hybrid working in London and flexibility for strong candidates elsewhere in the UK.

Qualifications

• Experience extracting data from legacy or undocumented systems without relying on modern APIs.
• 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 experience end-to-end: VPC, ECS, Lambda, S3, KMS.
• Security awareness: GuardDuty, SecurityHub or equivalent.
• Data warehousing (Redshift, Glue, Snowflake) and orchestration (Airflow, dbt or Prefect).
• Comfort with streaming/connectivity (Kafka, JDBC/ODBC) and data quality/schema tooling (Great Expectations, Pydantic, Avro/Protobuf).

Responsibilities

• Extract data from legacy systems and non-uniform sources where APIs are limited or unavailable.
• Build data models, pipelines, and last-mile integrations across fragmented infrastructure.
• Own back-end services supporting pipelines, including infrastructure as code.
• Manage ETL, schema mapping, and reconciliation across legacy and modern systems.
• Work with zero-copy and data virtualization where extraction isn't possible.
• Operate in short iterative cycles with high autonomy and no fixed playbook.

Skills

Legacy data extraction

Node/TypeScript

Python

AWS

Data modelling

ETL

Data warehousing

Kafka

Security awareness

Streaming

Tools

Terraform

Pulumi

Lambda

S3

ECS

Airflow

dbt

Job description

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

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
• UI‑based legacy ingestion tooling specifically
• Dual cloud and on‑prem deployment experience

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:

• 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.