Remote Data Engineering Lead in Essex

Attio is the CRM built for the AI era. Designed for the most ambitious go-to-market teams, it gives companies the power to understand every customer, automate at scale, and build their go-to-market motion exactly as they need. We've raised $116M from some of the world's best investors: GV (Google Ventures), Redpoint, Balderton, Point Nine, and 01A. We hire builders who thrive on complex technical challenges, hold themselves to a high bar, and genuinely care about delighting the people who use what they build. The team here brings sharp judgement, real craft, and the drive to do exceptional work. We're obsessed about the details and energized by the frontier. If you want to do the best work of your career, this is the right place.

About the role

Our Engineering team tackles the toughest challenges, so our users never have to. Real-time infrastructure, AI-native architecture, and a frontend that feels effortless — all powered by a team that moves fast, thinks rigorously, and holds an exceptionally high bar for quality. We’re hiring Attio’s first dedicated Data Engineering Lead to build the infrastructure, pipelines and standards that enable the company to operate on reliable, trusted data at scale. As our inaugural Lead Data Engineer, you’ll own and evolve our internal data platform end-to-end — improving reliability, enabling better decision-making, and shaping the long-term foundations of data across the business. Your work will directly support teams across Product, Engineering, Marketing, Finance and Go-To-Market.

We see this as far more than a traditional Data Engineering role. It’s an opportunity to define and shape Attio’s future data capability from the ground up — operating as a highly hands-on senior IC initially, whilst helping establish the foundations, standards and strategic roadmap for how the broader data function evolves over time. The role is ideally suited to someone who enjoys bringing structure to ambiguity, solving complex infrastructure challenges, and working closely with the business in a fast-moving, product-led environment. We’re looking for someone who is equally comfortable being hands-on and building, whilst also thinking strategically about how scalable data systems, processes and teams should evolve over time.

What you'll do

• Build and stabilise core data infrastructure: Design, build and maintain reliable, scalable pipelines and systems that ensure data flows correctly across the business and support critical operational and reporting workflows.
• Improve data reliability and observability: Own and improve the quality, resilience and maintainability of Attio’s broader data infrastructure — helping reduce operational risk and improve trust in the data underpinning the business.
• Shape Attio’s future data architecture: Partner closely with Product, Engineering and business stakeholders to define how our data platform should evolve over time, balancing immediate business needs with long-term scalability.
• Enable better business decision-making: Help create the foundational datasets, transformations and infrastructure required to support experimentation, analytics and operational reporting across the company.
• Operate as a senior technical leader: Bring clarity and direction within ambiguity — taking loosely defined problems, creating clear plans of execution, and driving outcomes with a high degree of ownership and autonomy.
• Help build the future data function: Contribute toward defining best practices, technical standards and longer-term hiring plans as Attio’s data capability matures and scales over time.

What you’ll bring

• Strong Data Engineering foundations: Deep hands-on experience designing and maintaining modern data infrastructure, pipelines and transformation layers within cloud-native environments.
• Technical depth across modern data tooling: Strong hands-on Data Engineering capability across modern tooling such as BigQuery, DBT, SQL and Python (or equivalent ecosystems e.g. Snowflake).
• Startup or scale-up experience: You’ve operated within fast-moving product or engineering-led environments and understand how to balance speed, ambiguity and long-term technical quality.
• Translation across abstraction levels: Able to move fluently between ambiguous business problems and precise technical implementation by translating effectively in both directions.
• Quantitative reasoning: Able to translate ambiguous business concepts (e.g. “activated workspace” or “qualified lead”) into clear, measurable and defensible definitions, with strong judgement around whether resulting outputs represent meaningful signal or simply noise.
• High ownership and autonomy: Comfortable operating as a senior IC with minimal direction. You have experience being responsible for problems end-to-end and driving them through to resolution.
• Pragmatic technical leadership: You’re able to bring structure and prioritisation to unclear problem spaces, communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, and influence decisions across the business.
• Commercial and operational awareness: You understand that data infrastructure is not just an engineering problem: it directly impacts product velocity, reporting accuracy, experimentation capability and commercial performance.
• Bias for action: You move with urgency, enjoy solving difficult problems, and are equally comfortable operating strategically as you are rolling up your sleeves and building directly.

What we offer

• Competitive salary of £115,000 - £145,000
• Equity in an early-stage tech company on an incredible trajectory
• 25 days holiday plus local public holidays
• Apple hardware
• Private medical insurance through AXA
• Pension contribution through Hargreaves Lansdown
• Enhanced family leave
• Team off-site in fun places! (We've been to Barcelona, Lisbon, Malta, and Split so far)

What does the hiring process look like?

• Initial Conversations
• 30-minute introductory call with a member of our Talent team
• 45-minute conversation with our CTO