Senior Data Engineer (Founding Team)

Senior Data Engineer (Founding Platform Lead)Our client is a private, entrepreneurial, family owned real estate platform with a multi billion pound property portfolio and private credit book. They're building their first proper tech function from scratch, and this is the founding hire to lead it.This is a founding level hire. You'll take on a high ownership role, defining the technical roadmap and building the data platform that connects a business that has never had one, shaping how the organisation runs going forward rather than maintaining someone else's system.What they need builtA robust data model acting as a single source of truth, reconciling properties, entities, leases, tenants, projects, invoices, cash flows, valuations and documents across multiple data sources. Integrations with third party vendors via APIs, webhooks, database access and scheduled ingestion. Automation that eliminates repetitive manual work across data collection, validation, approvals, reconciliation, reminders, document generation and reporting. Dashboards, reports, alerts and internal applications that principals and operating teams can actually trust and use. LLM pipelines for extraction, classification, retrieval and workflow support, built with evals, human in the loop oversight and auditability.How you'd workWith genuine autonomy, balancing a robust platform architecture against rapid delivery. Setting the standards for security, testing, deployment, monitoring and documentation as you go, since none currently exist. Managing selected vendors and building the engineering culture from the ground up. Mentoring a junior data engineer as the team grows. Close to the business, handling financially sensitive, personal and commercially confidential information with mature judgement in a regulated environment.What they needA strong record of building and operating reliable pipelines, integrations, data models or platforms serving real users and business critical decisions. Strong programming fundamentals in Python, TypeScript and SQL, with the ability to review and maintain a high quality bar for other contributors' code. Confidence building robust REST APIs, working with relational databases such as PostgreSQL, modelling data, building ETL/ELT pipelines, and making pragmatic build versus buy calls. Experience deploying production systems on AWS, Azure or GCP, including monitoring, secrets management, access control, backups and disaster recovery. Experience with production LLM pipelines, covering context engineering, evaluation, retrieval, tool use and guardrails.Nice to haveExperience in proptech, fintech, accounting technology, asset management, construction, private investment operations or another data intensive regulated environment. Familiarity with modern data warehouses, transformation and orchestration tools, BI platforms and internal web applications. Experience taking a platform from prototype to production, or working in an early stage company with a rapidly evolving product.For more information: Max.Benmayor@Arrowsgroup.com