Data Engineer (Multiple Roles) - AI SaaS in City of London

Vortexa is a fast‑growing international technology business founded to solve the immense information gap that exists in the energy industry. By using massive amounts of new satellite data and pioneering work in artificial intelligence, Vortexa creates an unprecedented view on the global seaborne energy flows in real‑time, bringing transparency and efficiency to the energy markets and society as a whole.

Role

Processing thousands of rich data points per second from many and vastly different external sources, moving terabytes of data while processing it in real‑time, running complex prediction and forecasting AI models while coupling their output into a hybrid human‑machine data refinement process and presenting the result through a nimble low‑latency SaaS solution used by customers around the globe is no small feat of science and engineering. This processing requires models that can survive the scrutiny of industry experts, data analysts and traders, with the performance, stability, latency and agility a fast‑moving startup influencing multi‑$m transactions requires.

The Data Production Team is responsible for all of Vortexa's data. It ranges from mixing raw satellite data from 600,000 vessels with rich but incomplete text data, to generating high‑value forecasts such as the vessel destination, cargo onboard, ship‑to‑ship transfer detection, dark vessels, congestion, future prices, etc.

The team has built a variety of procedural, statistical and machine learning models that enabled us to provide the most accurate and comprehensive view of energy flows. We take pride in applying cutting‑edge research to real‑world problems in a robust, long‑lasting and maintainable way. The quality of our data is continuously benchmarked and assessed by experienced in‑house market and data analysts to ensure the quality of our predictions.

You'll be instrumental in designing and building infrastructure and applications to propel the design, deployment, and benchmarking of existing and new pipelines and ML models. Working with software and data engineers, data scientists and market analysts, you'll help bridge the gap between scientific experiments and commercial products by ensuring 100% uptime and bullet‑proof fault‑tolerance of every component of the team's data pipelines.

Qualifications

• Experienced in building and deploying distributed scalable backend data processing pipelines that can go through terabytes of data daily using AWS, K8s, and Airflow.
• With solid software engineering fundamentals, fluent in both Java and Python (with Rust good to have).
• Knowledgeable about data lake systems like Athena, and big data storage formats like Parquet, HDF5, ORC, with a focus on data ingestion.
• Driven by working in an intellectually engaging environment with the top minds in the industry, where constructive and friendly challenges and debates are encouraged, not avoided.
• Excited about working in a start‑up environment: not afraid of challenges, excited to bring new ideas to production, and a positive can‑do will‑do person, not afraid to push the boundaries of your job role.
• Passionate about coaching developers, helping them improve their skills and grow their careers.
• Deep experience of the full software development life cycle (SDLC), including technical design, coding standards, code review, source control, build, test, deploy, and operations.

Preferred Skills

• Have experience with Apache Kafka and streaming frameworks, e.g., Flink.
• Familiar with observability principles such as logging, monitoring, and tracing.
• Have experience with web scraping technologies and information extraction.
• A vibrant, diverse company pushing ourselves and the technology to deliver beyond the cutting edge.
• A team of motivated characters and top minds striving to be the best at what we do at all times.
• Constantly learning and exploring new tools and technologies.
• Acting as company owners (all Vortexa staff have equity options) – in a business‑savvy and responsible way.
• Motivated by being collaborative, working and achieving together.
• A flexible working policy – accommodating both remote & home working, with regular staff events.
• Private Health Insurance offered via Vitality to help you look after your physical health.
• Global Volunteering Policy to help you 'do good' and feel better.