Lead/Staff Data Platform Engineer (Contract - 3-6 months)

Gorilla - Energy data applications; London; On-site; GBP 125,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Gorilla is seeking a Lead/Staff Data Platform Engineer to enhance its energy data applications during a critical scaling phase. This contract role focuses on improving developer experience and operational reliability in a fast-paced environment. You'll lead initiatives to optimize the internal data platform, utilizing your expertise in AWS, Python, and data infrastructure to deliver high-impact results.

Qualifications

• Deep experience designing and building data platforms in production.
• Expertise in AWS services (Lambda, ECS/EC2, S3, RDS).
• Strong hands-on experience with Terraform and infrastructure-as-code.

Responsibilities

• Lead engineering initiatives to improve the internal data platform.
• Design and implement platform services for energy data handling.
• Collaborate with teams to drive improvements and product innovation.

Skills

Python

AWS

Terraform

Data platforms

CI/CD

Distributed systems

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. We’re looking for a Lead/Staff Data Platform Engineer to join us during a critical phase of platform scaling and architectural evolution.

This is a contract role for 3–6 months, where you’ll apply your deep technical expertise to deliver immediate impact on our internal data platform. You’ll improve developer experience, observability, and reliability while driving key engineering initiatives.

Your Role

As a Lead/Staff Data Platform Engineer, you’ll play a hands-on leadership role focused on strengthening our internal data platform and enabling product and engineering teams to move faster and safer. You will:

• Lead short-term, high-priority engineering initiatives to scale and improve our internal data platform.

• Design, implement, and evolve platform services that support secure, efficient handling of large-scale energy data using modern tooling (e.g., Terraform, Docker, AWS-native tools).

• Collaborate with backend, data engineering, and DevOps stakeholders to identify bottlenecks and drive platform improvements that enable product innovation.

• Support reliability and operational excellence by implementing observability, automation, and incident response best practices.

• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, workflow orchestration improvements, and infrastructure-as-code optimization.

• Provide architectural guidance and hands-on mentoring to engineers across teams.

• Document changes, create transition plans, and support a smooth handover of context and ownership to the permanent team at the end of your engagement.

What You’ll Need

• Ability to ramp up quickly and deliver high-impact results in a short time.

• Strong Python skills and a solid grasp of software engineering principles.

• Deep experience designing and building data platforms or internal platform infrastructure at scale in production environments.

• Expertise in AWS (especially Lambda, ECS/EC2, S3, and RDS).

• Strong hands-on experience with Terraform and infrastructure-as-code practices.

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

• Understanding of CI/CD, observability, and platform reliability practices in cloud-native environments.

• Experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes) in production environments.

• Good understanding of distributed systems, data governance, and security in regulated or high-compliance contexts.

• A collaborative mindset, excellent communication skills, and the ability to align stakeholders around technical goals.

• Willingness to lead by doing: you model best practices, coach others, and drive clarity in complex systems.