Lead Data Architect — Build the AI Data Backbone

Nextech; Sefton; Hybrid; GBP 144,000 - 176,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Job summary

Nextech in London is hiring a Lead Data Engineer to architect and lead our data infrastructure for an AI platform. You will own data architecture, real-time pipelines, and ML data workflows, guiding a growing data function from the ground up.

The role emphasizes LLM-native capabilities, vector retrieval, embeddings, and governance. You will work directly with founders and product leadership to set data standards and future hiring bar.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in dedicated data engineering roles.
• Proven track record building data pipelines and distributed systems.
• Expertise with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred).
• Experience with NoSQL and vector databases in modern AI systems.
• Strong Python programming experience.
• Able to justify architectural calls, not just implement.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build scalable data pipelines and infrastructure for AI and product systems.
• Design ingestion, transformation, and storage architectures for operational and AI workloads.
• Develop and manage batch and real-time data pipelines.
• Build and optimise vector search, retrieval, and ML data pipelines.
• Own data reliability, security, and governance.

Skills

Python

PostgreSQL

NoSQL databases

Vector databases

Distributed systems

Data pipelines

Architectural decisions

Tools

Spark

Airflow

Kafka

Elasticsearch/OpenSearch

MongoDB

Qdrant/Milvus/pgvector

Pandas/Polars

Cloud infra

Job description

Nextech in London is hiring a Lead Data Engineer to architect and lead our data infrastructure for an AI platform. You will own data architecture, real-time pipelines, and ML data workflows, guiding a growing data function from the ground up.

The role emphasizes LLM-native capabilities, vector retrieval, embeddings, and governance. You will work directly with founders and product leadership to set data standards and future hiring bar.