Data Engineer

Citywire's data platform powers products across the company, both internal and external, from our industry ratings to our growing estate of production AI systems. We're hiring a Data Engineer to help build the pipelines and data models at the heart of it - taking requirements from stakeholder teams and turning them into tested, scheduled, monitored production systems. This is a growth role by design. You'll work directly with, and be mentored by, the platform lead - on architecture, on production engineering discipline, and on working effectively with AI coding agents at production scale.

What you'll be doing:

• Production data modelling: Translate analyst requirements and SQL into robust, production-grade dbt models (source → warehouse → reporting layers). You'll own data contracts, documentation, testing, and scheduling, with orchestration managed via Prefect.
• Large-scale fund and manager performance computation: Help decompose a legacy performance engine into a modern, event-driven AWS architecture (EventBridge, SQS, Lambda, S3, RDS). You'll build parallel compute pipelines using Spark on EMR (no deep prior Spark experience needed, just a strong curiosity for distributed systems).
• Data models for AI systems: Partner with the Platform Lead to design, build, and maintain the data models powering our AI platform - spanning fund and share class data, clickstream interactions, and CRM and finance systems.
• Alerting and observability: Ensure operational health across all pipelines via structured logging, metrics, DLQ tracking, and purposeful alerting. We view observability as a core engineering practice and will support your growth in designing resilient event-driven systems. Work directly with the analyst team and the data quality team, from requirement through deployment.

What we're looking for:

• Real dbt experience: You've built and maintained models in a genuine project - incremental logic, tests, an understanding of why downstream consumers matter. It doesn't need to have been enormous; it needs to have been real. BigQuery experience is a plus; another warehouse is fine.
• Solid Python and SQL skills: You have the instinct that code going to production deserves tests.
• Practical AWS Experience: You have hands-on experience deploying and debugging in AWS. You don't need to know every service we use on day one - we’ll teach you our specific stack.
• Strong CLI Skills: Proficient with terminal-driven workflows, containerized environments, and shell scripting for debugging, automation, and local development.
• Pragmatic AI Tooling: You leverage AI coding assistants to speed up your workflow, but bring critical oversight to their output - reviewing, testing, and verifying generated code rather than shipping it on faith.
• Data Intuition & Rigor: You look beyond passing CI/CD checks. When a pipeline runs green but the outputs look off, you dig into the numbers, comparing runs, spotting unexpected anomalies, and validating the business logic behind the data.
• Accountability & Resilience: You take pride in what you build. You learn from production mistakes, own the outcome, and prefer holding accountability for your own pipelines over handing off maintenance to someone else.
• Collaborative Communication: You can sit side-by-side with analysts, understand the intent behind their SQL, and partner with them to translate complex business logic into efficient, production-ready solutions.

Nice to Have (Genuinely learnable here - we will train you):

• Frameworks & Tools: Spark on EMR, Prefect (or experience transferring from Airflow/Dagster), OpenSearch.
• Architecture: Event-driven design patterns, SurrealDB or graph data stores.
• Domain Knowledge: Financial services or asset management context.

Meet Citywire: We cover - and connect - all sides of the $100 trillion global asset management industry - through our news, events and insights. At Citywire, we uphold a culture rooted in honesty, integrity, and fairness, where every voice is valued and heard. Our culture promotes constructive dialogue and collaboration on a global scale. Join the team at the Heart of Wealth.

Our perks:

• Generous holiday entitlement: Start with 25 days per annum, increasing to 28 days after three years' service, and 30 days after five years' service, in addition to bank holidays.
• Flexible working options.
• Annual allowance for well-being activities or gym memberships, with assistance available for monthly or annual costs.
• Eye-test and glasses allowance.
• Competitive private pension scheme.
• Critical illness cover and group life assurance from day one of employment.
• Well-being support: Access to an independent Employee Assistance Programme, available 24/7.
• Cycle to work scheme and annual travel card loans.
• Techscheme: Purchase the latest tech through our employer scheme, spreading the cost over 12 months with National Insurance savings.
• After two years of continuous service, access group income protection, private medical, and dental insurance.

Citywire is an equal opportunities employer.