Senior Data Engineer — Hybrid London, BigQuery

Blue Bear Capital; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 75,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Apolitical is seeking a Data Platform Engineer to own ingestion and integration into BigQuery, manage orchestration and infrastructure, and build governed data services for product teams. You will implement secure data access, develop self‑serve data capabilities, and contribute to a scalable data platform with dbt, Airflow, and Python—supporting government-focused missions.

You will collaborate across Engineering and Data teams, own pipelines end‑to‑end, and promote robust CI/CD, cost

Qualifications

• Experience building and operating production data infrastructure on a cloud data warehouse.
• Strong SQL and data modelling, including dimensional modelling and production dbt with tests, version control and CI/CD.
• Experience applying governance, access control and UK GDPR in practice.

Responsibilities

• Own ingestion and integration – bring data into BigQuery from a varied source estate, including product databases, Contentful, HubSpot, Notion and LLM tracing tools, using Airflow, Airbyte and Python pipelines that fail loudly rather than silently.
• Run the data platform – operate orchestration, Terraform-managed infrastructure, containerised workloads and day-to-day BigQuery administration, including performance and cost.
• Write data back safely – own reverse‑ETL pipelines from BigQuery into live systems such as HubSpot, Postgres and Pinecone, with safeguards that stop a bad run reaching users.
• Govern sensitive data – apply and extend role-based access control, column-level policy tags, PII conventions, retention and lineage, so our handling of public servants' data meets UK GDPR and partners' residency requirements.
• Model data for self‑serve and AI – extend our 600+ model dbt project and design the semantic layer that lets Product, Partnerships and Delivery and other teams query governed data, including in natural language.
• Raise quality and engineering standards – extend our home‑built data quality system and CI, record technical decisions clearly, and improve others' work through review and mentoring.

Tools

BigQuery

dbt Core

Airflow

Airbyte

Python

Terraform

GitHub Actions

Job description

Apolitical is seeking a Data Platform Engineer to own ingestion and integration into BigQuery, manage orchestration and infrastructure, and build governed data services for product teams. You will implement secure data access, develop self‑serve data capabilities, and contribute to a scalable data platform with dbt, Airflow, and Python—supporting government-focused missions.

You will collaborate across Engineering and Data teams, own pipelines end‑to‑end, and promote robust CI/CD, cost