Member of Technical Staff - Data Engineer (up to £200k)

Dex; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Dex is partnering with a seed-stage research lab in London to recruit a data platform engineer who will own end-to-end data infrastructure for AI training environments. You will design scalable ingestion, processing, and storage systems, and implement automated validation and sanitisation pipelines for large real-world datasets.

You will work across software, platform, and AI engineering boundaries to optimize latency, observability, and cost while staying close to production code.

Qualifications

• Proven track record designing, shipping, and operating large-scale data systems end to end.
• Strong software fundamentals and ability to debug unfamiliar codebases.
• Experience handling messy datasets with ingestion, validation, or sanitisation bottlenecks.
• Ability to define system architecture from ambiguous requirements and deliver production systems.

Responsibilities

• Architect and operate scalable ingestion, processing, and storage systems for high-volume datasets.
• Build automated validation, sanitisation, and PII-redaction pipelines for AI training data.
• Balance storage, latency, observability, reliability, and cloud costs through pragmatic trade-offs.
• Establish reusable data platform patterns for other engineers to reuse.
• Debug production failures across the stack and deploy modern tooling to keep feedback loops tight.

Skills

Distributed systems

Data ingestion

PII sanitisation

Observability

Cloud costs

Tools

Airflow

Spark

SQL

Job description

This role is with one of Dex's trusted partner companies. We work closely with their teams to truly understand their culture, goals, and what they're looking for, so we can match you with the right opportunity and give you context about the role before you commit to a process.

The role

Training frontier AI agents requires interactive digital environments where models can act, fail, and learn across real software. In roughly a year, this seed-stage research lab has scaled to over 50 engineers across London and Paris, partnered with multiple frontier AI labs, and secured backing from top-tier investors and founders. The core constraint on agent performance is data: acquiring, sanitising, and reliably serving massive, messy real-world datasets to the engineers building those training environments.

You will own the data platform powering these environments end to end, from architectural design to production debugging. This is not a BI or reporting seat, and it is not an isolated pipeline-plumbing gig. You will work across software, platform, and AI engineering boundaries to build high-throughput ingestion, automated PII sanitisation, and validation engines, staying close to production code rather than just configuring vendor dashboards.

The work

• Architect and operate scalable ingestion, processing, and storage systems that handle messy, high-volume datasets from real-world software environments.
• Build automated validation, sanitisation, and PII-redaction pipelines that make raw data immediately usable for AI training environments.
• Make pragmatic technical trade-offs across storage, retrieval latency, observability, system reliability, and cloud costs.
• Establish reusable data platform patterns that other software and AI engineers can build on, eliminating the need to solve dataset ingest on an ad-hoc basis.
• Debug unfamiliar production failures across the stack and deploy modern tooling to keep engineering feedback loops tight.

What You Bring

• Proven track record designing, shipping, and operating substantial production data systems end to end, with personal ownership over the architectural decisions and outcomes.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals with the ability to dive deep into unfamiliar codebases and debug complex, distributed failure modes.
• Direct experience working through large, messy, or adversarial datasets where ingestion, validation, or sanitisation posed genuine technical bottlenecks.
• Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous requirements, define the necessary system architecture, and ship production systems without detailed functional specs.
• Based in or able to work hybrid from London or Paris.

Why apply through Dex

Stealth AI labs are flooded with noise, making it difficult to distinguish genuine infrastructure challenges from wrapped prototypes. Dex cuts through blind applications by matching your engineering depth directly to high-conviction teams with real runway and top-tier backing. You get briefed on technical scope, architecture, and compensation calibration before you ever enter the loop.