Founding Data Platform Engineer - London

Are you a Data Engineer who wants to build something properly, from the first line of code, and own every decision that goes into it?

Most senior data roles are inherited. Someone else picked the stack, someone else designed the model, and your job is to keep it running and apologise for it. This is the opposite of that.

A private, entrepreneurial family-owned real estate group with a multi-billion-pound property portfolio and private credit book is building its data capability in-house. You are the first senior hire into it, and you set the strategic direction of the platform. The stack, the data model, what gets built and what gets bought, all of it is yours to call.

They've grown across property management, asset management and accounting, each with its own specialist system. They've decided to build a single platform across all of it rather than hand it to a consultancy, and this is the person who does that.

WHAT YOU'D ACTUALLY BE DOING

• Turning the highest-value problems in the business into a technical roadmap, balancing solid architecture against getting things live quickly
• Designing the data model and pipelines that reconcile properties, entities, leases, tenants, projects, invoices, cash flows, valuations and documents across multiple sources
• Integrating third-party systems through APIs, webhooks, database access and scheduled ingestion
• Stripping out the repetitive manual work, from collection, validation, approvals and reconciliation through to reporting and document generation
• Delivering dashboards, reports, alerts and internal applications the principals and operating teams actually trust
• Building LLM pipelines for extraction, classification, retrieval and workflow support, with evaluations, human-in-the-loop oversight and auditability
• Setting the standards for security, testing, deployment and monitoring, and mentoring the junior data engineer

WHAT YOU'LL NEED

• Typically 5+ years building data platforms, with strong Python, SQL and ideally TypeScript
• Data modelling depth, particularly reconciling records across systems never designed to talk to each other
• Hands-on LLM pipeline work in production
• The appetite to own decisions rather than implement someone else's

WHY THIS ONE IS DIFFERENT

It's family-owned, so decisions get made in days rather than quarters. No steering committee, no six-week approval cycle. You sit with the principals and the operating teams, so what you build goes live and gets used that week.

And the architecture you set in year one is what this business runs on for the next ten. That's a rare amount of influence for one engineer.