Senior Data Engineer

Ceto

Greater London

Hybrid

GBP 70,000 - 110,000

Full time

3 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity options

Birthdays off

Bupa medical insurance

Cycle to work scheme

Hybrid working from our London office

Conferences and professional dev

Shape the future of maritime tech

Job summary

Ceto is hiring a data engineer to own the platform powering Watchkeeper. You will build and maintain production data pipelines, APIs, and data storage to feed predictive analytics for ships.

You’ll work across APIs, ingestion pipelines, databases, infrastructure, and front-end integration, collaborating with data scientists and clients. You have strong Python skills, handle billions of data points, and deploy in cloud and containerised environments.

Qualifications

Experience building production-grade software across the full data stack.
Experience handling large datasets (billions of records) and scalable storage.
Experience building production APIs with modern frameworks.
Hands-on with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP).
Knowledge of containerised deployments (Docker) and CI/CD processes.
Familiarity with NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB) and distributed systems.

Responsibilities

Own the data platform from database to vessel sensor assignment.
Design and build data pipelines for efficient data transport.
Design data structures and schemas to serve product needs.
Build and maintain APIs and improve existing services (emissions engine).
Collaborate with clients’ technical teams to capture requirements.
Improve internal tools to enhance developer experience.
Work with data scientists to provide required data.
Contribute across the stack, including platform frontend when needed.

Skills

Python

Data libraries

APIs

Cloud platforms

Docker

CI/CD

Distributed systems

NoSQL

Job description

Ship maintenance is broken. We're fixing it.

Ceto is a fleet intelligence company. Our platform, Watchkeeper, takes the high-frequency sensor data ships already generate and predicts machinery failures before they happen — on one vessel we flagged a developing fuel-system issue days before a critical failure, on a ship earning $48,000 a day. No new hardware, no rip-and-replace: if an owner is already capturing data, we can have a full fleet live in days. We're deployed across fleets owned by major global shipowners, and we sell directly to the ship owners and operators who feel every day of unplanned off-hire on their P&L.

We're a small, senior team - our CEO spent eight years at sea as a marine engineer before founding the company; we’re backed by investors including Dynamo Ventures who led our $4.8m seed round, and we're compounding fast which is exactly why we need you.

What we're doing

We're reshaping maritime. It's an industry that's incredibly important and serves as the backbone of global trade, moving $14 trillion of cargo each year. Despite its significance, the industry remains one of the final frontiers of digitalisation.

Ceto provides the operational intelligence layer that technical teams rely on for mission-critical decision making. By capturing and analysing high-frequency data from commercial ships, Ceto monitors the condition of the machinery onboard. Through anomaly detection and degradation forecasting we predict mechanical failures ahead of time and guide decision making for our customers. Our analytics are served as insights through our dashboard, preventing costly breakdowns, loss of hire events and reducing operational risk.

The role

We’re hiring for a data engineer who has experience building and maintaining production software across the full stack. This role requires you to wear many hats, operating across the full breadth of our production tech: APIs, ingestion pipelines, databases, infrastructure, architecture, orchestration, tooling and the occasional dash of front end. You will fundamentally own all the technology that supplies our predictive analytics with data and serve those analytics to the customer.

Your responsibilities will include:

Owning the data platform, from the database through to the vessel sensor assignment
Designing and building systems and pipelines for transporting data efficiently
Designing and implementing data structures / schemas that serve our product needs
Building and maintaining APIs
Maintaining and improving existing services and products such as our emissions engine
Interfacing with our clients’ technical teams to understand their technical requirements
Building and improving internal tools that improve developer experience
Working closely with our data scientists to supply the data they require
Working throughout the rest of our technical stack where required e.g. implementing a new feature in the platform front end

Two firm requirements:

You have experience in an early-stage startup and are comfortable working at speed, context switching and turning ambiguous problems into delivered solutions
You’re AI-native, using the modern tools to increase your productivity and you have a good feel for when to trust agents and when to do the work by hand

You'll be perfect for this role if:

You have strong Python skills and know its data libraries (pandas/polars/numpy)
You have experience dealing with large datasets (billions of data points) and maintaining databases to support this volume of data
You enjoy learning new technologies and want to work across the full breadth of a platform
You have built production APIs with modern frameworks (Flask/Fast/Express/H3) and understand best practices e.g. authentication + authorization
You have experience with cloud platforms (Azure preferred, AWS, GCP) and have shipped production systems to the cloud
You understand engineering best practices and have exposure to CI/CD + DevOps
You have worked with containerised applications and Docker
You are comfortable working in an ambiguous problem space and can weigh up the trade-offs quickly and effectively
You are a good communicator and know what level of technicality to express depending on your audience e.g. speaking with a non-technical client

It's also a bonus if you have:

You have experience working in a polyglot codebase (Typescript preferred) and have worked in multiple languages
You have exposure to distributed systems / microservices
You have a mechanical engineering background and understand what you might expect from a given engine sensor
You have worked with MongoDB or other NoSQL databases
You have experience working directly with clients, reading between the lines to define a product/feature/fix that matches their needs

We're less interested in ticking off niche experience like maritime or MongoDB specifically, and far more interested in someone who has worked across different technical stacks and can pick up new ones quickly. A strong generalist who's genuinely curious about the wider engineering problem, will do better here than a narrow specialist.

What's on offer