Founding Data Platform Engineer - London

Morela Solutions; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Morela Solutions, a private real estate group, seeks a senior Data Engineer to own the data platform strategy from design to deployment. You will shape the data model, pipelines, and integrations across properties, asset management, and accounting, building a single platform rather than outsourcing to consultants.

You’ll own the technical roadmap, mentor juniors, and deliver dashboards and internal tools used by principals and operating teams, with immediate live impact.

Qualifications

• 5+ years building data platforms with Python and SQL.
• Data modelling across disparate systems.
• Hands-on production work with LLM pipelines.
• Willingness to own decisions and drive architecture.

Responsibilities

• Turn high-value business problems into a technical roadmap and architecture.
• Design data model and pipelines across properties, leases, invoices and documents.
• Integrate third-party systems via APIs, webhooks, DB access, and scheduled ingestion.
• Eliminate repetitive manual work from collection to reporting and doc generation.
• Deliver dashboards, alerts, and internal apps trusted by principals and teams.
• Build LLM pipelines for extraction, classification, retrieval, and workflow support.
• Set standards for security, testing, deployment and monitoring, and mentor juniors.

Skills

Python

SQL

TypeScript

Data modeling

LLM pipelines

Ownership mindset

Tools

APIs

Webhooks

Database access

Scheduled ingestions

Job description

Are you a Data Engineer who wants to build something properly, from the first line of code, and own every decision that goes into it?

Most senior data roles are inherited. Someone else picked the stack, someone else designed the model, and your job is to keep it running and apologise for it. This is the opposite of that.

A private, entrepreneurial family-owned real estate group with a multi-billion-pound property portfolio and private credit book is building its data capability in-house. You are the first senior hire into it, and you set the strategic direction of the platform. The stack, the data model, what gets built and what gets bought, all of it is yours to call.

They've grown across property management, asset management and accounting, each with its own specialist system. They've decided to build a single platform across all of it rather than hand it to a consultancy, and this is the person who does that.

WHAT YOU'D ACTUALLY BE DOING

• Turning the highest-value problems in the business into a technical roadmap, balancing solid architecture against getting things live quickly
• Designing the data model and pipelines that reconcile properties, entities, leases, tenants, projects, invoices, cash flows, valuations and documents across multiple sources
• Integrating third-party systems through APIs, webhooks, database access and scheduled ingestion
• Stripping out the repetitive manual work, from collection, validation, approvals and reconciliation through to reporting and document generation
• Delivering dashboards, reports, alerts and internal applications the principals and operating teams actually trust
• Building LLM pipelines for extraction, classification, retrieval and workflow support, with evaluations, human-in-the-loop oversight and auditability
• Setting the standards for security, testing, deployment and monitoring, and mentoring the junior data engineer

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

• Typically 5+ years building data platforms, with strong Python, SQL and ideally TypeScript
• Data modelling depth, particularly reconciling records across systems never designed to talk to each other
• Hands-on LLM pipeline work in production
• The appetite to own decisions rather than implement someone else's

WHY THIS ONE IS DIFFERENT

It's family-owned, so decisions get made in days rather than quarters. No steering committee, no six-week approval cycle. You sit with the principals and the operating teams, so what you build goes live and gets used that week.

And the architecture you set in year one is what this business runs on for the next ten. That's a rare amount of influence for one engineer.