Lead Backend Engineer, Data & AI

We are looking for a Lead Backend Engineer to join our Data & AI team within the Engineering function. Your mission will be to integrate data-driven insights and capabilities into our customer-facing products and core business operations. This is a new and vital role with a distinct focus on leveraging your data engineering skills to deliver real outcomes for customers. You will play a key part in leveraging our data to its fullest by establishing the infrastructure needed for analytics and reporting as well as the effective application of Machine Learning (ML) and Large Language Models (LLMs).

This is a hands-on individual contributor role for a leader who can shape conversations, weave together business needs with technical opportunities, and deliver pragmatic solutions that have a concrete business impact. You will report directly to the Head of Engineering as part of a specialist team.

As a Lead Backend Engineer, Data & AI, you will

• Define and own the data strategy in collaboration with the Head of Engineering, managing data infrastructure, schema and APIs, and ensuring data is user-friendly.
• Establish strong data foundations by identifying data sources, assessing their quality, iterating on the data model, and improving our data pipelines.
• Identify opportunities for product-driven AI initiatives and build working prototypes or complete solutions to deliver quick wins.
• Develop our foundational data architecture and outline key focus areas for the next 1-2 years, including democratising data access and determining our approach to LLM usage.
• Consider opportunities to adopt recent advances in AI workflows including Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agentic approaches leveraging existing foundational models.
• Take ownership of identifying and mitigating security, quality, and compliance risks within the data estate.
• Support and advise colleagues on the existing data stack.

• Has a product engineering mindset with a strong focus on customer outcomes.
• Has at least two years of practical experience in data engineering, including ingesting and transforming data and designing schemas.
• Has professional experience (at least 6+ months) integrating Machine Learning (ML) and Large Language Models (LLMs) into real business processes.
• Can demonstrate taking the lead on designing and implementing an AI solution that delivered significant customer benefits, from exploring the business use case to technical design.
• Has significant experience building responsive, performant APIs for internal and external engineering teams.
• Has experience with modern software engineering practices and backend languages.
• Is a leader who can independently shape conversations and decisions to deliver pragmatic solutions with concrete business impact.

• Have a deep experience in at least one Cloud Platform data stack, ideally GCP.
• Can communicate complex topics effectively with stakeholders of varying technical ability.
• Have experience working within cross-functional teams and collaborating with Product, Design, and Commercial departments.
• Have experience with Go or a strong desire to learn it.
• Have enabled and maintained 3rd party API integrations.
• Have experience with modern CI/CD pipelines, and have built and maintained test suites.
• Have a rounded full-stack engineering background.