Lead/Staff Data Platform Engineer

Gorilla; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 60,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

An established industry player is seeking a Lead/Staff Data Platform Engineer to shape the future of their data infrastructure. This role involves designing and scaling data platforms, driving cross-team initiatives, and ensuring operational excellence. You'll leverage your expertise in Python and AWS to enhance the developer experience while mentoring engineers and fostering a culture of collaboration. Join a forward-thinking company committed to innovation and sustainability in the energy sector, where your contributions will make a significant impact on the journey to net-zero.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in designing and scaling data platforms in production.
• Strong Python skills and solid software engineering principles.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical vision for the data platform and influence architectural decisions.
• Design and implement platform services for efficient data handling.

Skills

Python

Data Platform Design

Cloud Services (AWS)

Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)

CI/CD Practices

Container Orchestration (Kubernetes)

Observability

Data Governance

Distributed Computing

Mentoring

Tools

Terraform

AWS Lambda

AWS ECS/EC2

AWS S3

AWS RDS

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.