Senior Data Engineer in Croydon

Hozah is a tech-led, award-winning company driving change in the parking industry and reimagining urban mobility. Our mission is simple but powerful: to transform parking into a seamless, automated experience, paving the way for smarter, more sustainable cities.

With recent recognition as PayTech Company of the Year, a place among Deloitte's Top 50 Fastest Growing Tech Companies in the UK, and significant VC/PE investment, we're one of the fastest scaling companies in the country.

About the Role

• Location: London (Next to East Croydon Station)
• Hybrid: 3 days in office, 2 days from home
• Reports to: CTO
• Target start: Now

You will own the Hozah data platform. You'll take responsibility for ingestion, the BigQuery and Dataform warehouse, the management-information measures and KPI views, and the Metabase dashboards built on top of them. The Pub/Sub streams and the Terraform that provisions them stay with our engineering team, and you request and review those changes rather than write them. You are the person finance, operations and the wider business go to when they need to trust a number.

This role exists because the platform has outgrown what one person can carry alongside everything else. Demand for management information has grown faster than ad-hoc effort can keep up with, and the business needs numbers it does not have to double-check. We are hiring a senior engineer to take full ownership, make those numbers reliable, and build the dashboard layer the business runs on.

You'll work alongside backend engineers on the source systems that feed the warehouse, and directly with the CFO, COO, Client Service and the wider leadership team as the people who depend on what you build. This is a newly created role with no direct reports.

In your first quarter, you'll agree one new data capability with the CTO, and take it into production over your first year.

Responsibilities

• Own the Hozah data platform, from ingestion through to the dashboards the business relies on.
• Take full ownership of the BigQuery and Dataform warehouse, including CI and the path a change takes from a branch to production.
• Build and maintain ingestion from source systems, using tools such as Airbyte or Fivetran for SaaS connectors, alongside database replication and file loads, and know what can go wrong with each.
• Produce every department's KPIs from versioned, tested models, and deliver them on Metabase with no manual spreadsheet step in between.
• Set and monitor freshness expectations for every ingested source, so a stale source alerts a named owner rather than surfacing in a board pack.
• Work with the CFO, COO, CRO and other stakeholders to define and defend metric definitions, pushing back where a requested number would mislead.
• Agree one new data capability with the CTO in your first quarter, then see it into production and adopted by a named business owner.
• Be the platform's sole owner: triage issues, promote changes safely, and be the person the business trusts for numbers.

What We're Looking For

• You've owned a data warehouse or platform alone, or as its lead, including being the one who fixes it when it breaks. You can say exactly what you were accountable for and what you personally changed.
• You write deep SQL on a cloud warehouse such as BigQuery or Snowflake, inside a versioned transformation framework such as Dataform or dbt, with CI around it. You can explain how a change gets from a branch to production, and what stops a bad one getting there.
• You've made a disputed number trusted. You can walk through a specific incident from the last 12 months: how you found it, what the root cause was, and what now stops it happening again.
• You work directly with non-technical stakeholders, and you've refused or reshaped a metric definition you thought was wrong. You can say what you said, and what happened next.
• You've run at least two of the following: change-data-capture or replication, SaaS connectors, and file loads, and you can say what went wrong with each. Streaming experience is not required.
• You've built the dashboard or BI layer yourself for business users, not just fed the data underneath it. You can describe a dashboard you built that changed a decision.
• You've shipped one new data capability end to end, whether that's a machine learning model in production, a near real-time feed or a new data product. You can say who used it and whether it stuck.
• You're comfortable setting your own priorities in a fast-moving SME, and you're happy being the only data person in the company.
• Experience of GCP itself, Terraform, streaming, Kotlin or another JVM language, or Metabase is welcome, but none of it is required.

What We Offer

• Hybrid working, 3 days in the office and 2 days from home.
• Sole ownership of the data platform, reporting directly to the CTO.
• The chance to build Hozah's data function from a working base as we scale.
• A strong, high performing culture, with genuine influence over how that culture develops as Hozah grows.
• A fully refurbished, modern office, right next to East Croydon Station (with a fully stocked kitchen, offering free breakfast, lunch and drinks!).