Lead/Staff Data Platform Engineer

Gorilla; London; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading company is seeking a Lead/Staff Data Platform Engineer to join their innovative team in London. This role is pivotal in defining and scaling their data platform to drive initiatives across engineering functions. You'll be responsible for architecture design, enhancing developer experience, and ensuring operational excellence while collaborating with cross-functional teams. Ideal candidates will possess strong Python and AWS skills, extensive experience in data platforms, and a mentoring mindset.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in data platform design and backend infrastructure in production.
• Strong Python skills with software engineering principles.
• Expertise with AWS services and Terraform.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical vision and strategy of internal data platform.
• Design and implement platform services for data efficiency and security.
• Mentor and support engineers to improve practices and quality.

Skills

Python

Cloud-Native

Infrastructure-as-Code

Distributed Computing

Data Governance

Tools

Terraform

AWS

Kubernetes

Airflow

DBT

Snowflake

Databricks

Job description

At Gorilla, we're building the data infrastructure that powers energy companies on their journey to net-zero. As a Lead/Staff Data Platform Engineer, you'll play a key role in defining and scaling our data platform to meet the increasing complexity and volume of data-driven use cases in the energy industry. You’ll combine deep hands-on technical expertise with the ability to drive initiatives across teams, shaping the technical foundation that supports our products and customers.

You won’t just be building services—you’ll be designing the architecture, improving the developer experience, and guiding our platform strategy with a strong focus on performance, security, and scalability.

Your Role

• SaaS experience in high-load, data-intensive environments.

• Lead the technical vision and strategy of our internal data platform, influencing architectural decisions and establishing best practices across the engineering organization.

• Design, implement, and evolve platform services that enable teams to work with data efficiently and securely, using modern tooling such as Terraform, Docker, and cloud-native patterns.

• Drive cross-team initiatives, helping teams adopt and scale platform capabilities (e.g., CI/CD, observability, workflow orchestration) with a focus on reliability, security, and performance.

• Collaborate with stakeholders (data engineering, backend, DevOps, product) to identify platform gaps and design scalable, long-term solutions that unlock product innovation.

• Mentor and support engineers, fostering technical growth, improving team practices, and elevating the quality of engineering across the board.

• Ensure operational excellence by automating infrastructure, monitoring key systems, and leading incident response and root cause analysis for platform-related issues.

• Evaluate and introduce new technologies and practices (e.g., container orchestration, data lake solutions, workflow orchestration tools) based on evolving business needs.

What You’ll Need

• Proven experience designing, building, and scaling data platforms or backend infrastructure in production environments.

• Strong Python skills, with a solid foundation in software engineering principles.

• Expertise with AWS services, including Lambda, ECS/EC2, S3 and RDS.

• Deep experience with Terraform and infrastructure-as-code practices.

• Familiarity with tools like Airflow or DBT, and data platforms such as Snowflake or Databricks.

• Solid experience with CI/CD, observability, and platform reliability practices in cloud-native environments.

• Understanding of distributed computing concepts, and experience designing systems for scale, security, and availability.

• A proactive, collaborative mindset and demonstrated ability to lead technical projects and align stakeholders around shared goals.

• Strong communication skills and a mentoring attitude that improves the technical capabilities of those around you.

• Experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes) in cloud or hybrid environments.

• Understanding of data governance and security best practices in regulated industries.