Senior Data Platform Engineer

At Great Yellow, we’re looking for a Senior Data Platform Engineer to join our team.

Great Yellow is building the operating system for a regenerative economy. Our mission is to make regenerative land-use investable and scalable, helping businesses, investors, and land managers move from intention to investable action. We’re proving it in the UK on landmark landscape recovery projects, with proprietary natural capital valuation models and a growing team of advisors, project managers, ecological experts, engineers, and product thinkers.

We’re building the intelligence layer that will fundamentally reshape how land-use decisions are made, financed and scaled, toward a world where those decisions are systematically aligned across nature, infrastructure, agricultural production and human wellbeing. This is a system designed not just to analyse the world, but to actively coordinate regenerative land-use across landscapes, supply chains and asset classes.

We’re a small, early-stage technical team inside a wider commercial business. We ship fast, validate, and iterate.

About the Role

We’re looking for a senior engineer to design, build, and own the data pipelines and data architecture that feed both our customer-facing platform and our internal teams, and who has the software-engineering range to jump in alongside our product engineers when the work calls for it. This is a hands-on role reporting to the Head of Engineering. The volume of work isn’t the challenge, the variety is. Over the next 6-12 months we expect to stand up many pipelines across very different data shapes, from statutory BNG and carbon datasets to live environmental sensor feeds and investor data products. You’ll be the person who can look at a new source, pick the right pattern for it, build it, and know when and where it will strain.

You’ll thrive here if you like owning a work-stream end-to-end: design doc to production to iteration, without needing the thinking done for you. You’re equally comfortable shaping architecture and getting your hands dirty in the code.

What you’ll do:

• Design and own our data pipelines. Build and maintain robust ETL workflows across a deliberately diverse set of sources.
• Make sound architecture calls. Understand the difference between operational and analytical layers and design right-sized infrastructure that scales with us over time.
• Engage directly with the source. Work with subject-matter experts across the business to understand what the data means before you model it.
• Build for reliability. Put the hooks, monitoring, and KPIs in place to know how a pipeline is performing, where its limits are, and when it’s degrading, before someone else notices.
• Contribute to the platform. Pair with our Senior Software Developer on the customer-facing product. Critique designs, raise the bar, and help us build features that are well-tested and built to last.
• Use AI as a lever, not a crutch. We expect strong day-to-day fluency with AI-assisted development.
• Help shape what’s next. You’ll have real influence over the stack and the standards as the team grows.

What we’re looking for:

• Data engineering depth. Demonstrable experience designing, building, and maintaining production data pipelines across heterogeneous sources.
• Architectural judgement. You can reason about operational vs analytical layers, data lake / warehouse patterns, versioning and lineage.
• Software-engineering fundamentals. You’re a genuine engineer, not a tool operator; you can build from scratch.
• Autonomy. You can take ownership of a work-stream and drive it without the mental load sitting with the leadership team.
• Versatility. You’re comfortable with shifting priorities in an early-stage environment.
• Communication. You can translate business goals and SME knowledge into technical solutions.
• Locality. Within commuting distance of London, able to work 1–2 days a week from our central office.

Nice to have:

• Experience building, deploying, and maintaining machine-learning pipelines in production.
• Experience with Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and with vector or graph databases.
• Familiarity with a modern data stack.
• Experience with the Cloudflare ecosystem, or with serverless/edge-first architectures.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and message brokers/queues.
• Experience in fintech, climate, or other data-heavy / decision-support domains.
• A genuine interest in sustainability, nature recovery, and conservation finance.

Why Join Great Yellow?

• Be part of an innovative start-up that’s breaking new ground in finance and ecological restoration.
• Engage in meaningful work with the potential to make a lasting impact on the planet.
• Work alongside a passionate and diverse team in an environment that values flexibility, collaboration, autonomy, and growth.

Apply for the job. Do you want to join our team? Then we’d love to hear about you!