Staff Data Platform Engineer

We’re looking for a Staff Data Platform Engineer to join our Data team at Yoto, to help power insights and decision-making across the business. You'll set technical direction, raise the engineering bar across the data team, and shape how our data platform scales as Yoto grows.

About Yoto: Yoto is a screen-free interactive audio platform for kids. We make carefully connected audio players that kids control, with no microphones, cameras or ads. We have a catalogue of audio that inspires creative play and learning with 1,000+ titles in our card store from top creators, publishers and labels - think Disney, Marvel, Roald Dahl and Universal Music. We also create Yoto Originals like BrainBots.

We’re on a mission to be the soundtrack of childhood, and help families on their own unique adventures. By creating products that inspire independent play, we help families discover and grow with an inspiring world of audio - and we would like you to help us achieve it!

Yoto’s Data Team: We’re a growing team at the heart of all the decisions Yoto makes. We tackle a broad range of problems, from developing cutting edge data solutions to building and maintaining data pipelines, query and orchestration platforms. Our work spans across all the key strategic projects throughout the company. We supercharge growth by providing self-service tools, valuable insights and advanced data science solutions. We work in a high-trust environment with a lot of independence. Everyone can contribute ideas and be part of the decision making process.

What you’ll be doing:

• Own the architecture, reliability and long-term health of Yoto's end-to-end data platform, spanning GKE-hosted infrastructure, data ingestion, orchestration and transformation.
• Define and maintain the data platform roadmap, translating company strategy into a sequenced set of technical investments with clear short- and long-term trade-offs documented.
• Work across data science, analytics, product and software engineering to convert business requirements into platform capabilities, and ensure the platform serves company-wide use cases.
• Set and enforce standards for data governance, access controls, data quality and ownership across the platform.
• Manage and develop a mid-level data engineer directly, including regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and structured growth plans, while also raising technical capability across the wider data team through code review, documentation and pairing.

What you’ll bring:

• Extensive hands-on experience in data engineering or analytics engineering, with a demonstrable track record of owning platform-level systems end-to-end, not just individual pipelines.
• Experience designing and operating production data platforms across cloud infrastructure, orchestration, ingestion and SQL transformation layers.
• Practical experience with GCP, BigQuery, Terraform, Kubernetes, Dagster, dlt and dbt - or equivalent tools with the ability to articulate transferable reasoning.
• Demonstrated ability to make and document architecture decisions that involve meaningful trade-offs across multiple teams or domains.
• A track record of authoring and landing technical standards across Python, SQL and infrastructure code that other engineers, analysts and data scientists adopt in their day-to-day work.
• Experience defining the scope of ambiguous technical problems - identifying what needs to be built and why, not just executing against an existing spec.

Nice to have:

• Prior experience line managing an engineer, including setting objectives and running performance conversations.
• Familiarity with GitOps practices in a data platform context.

Salary: £80,000 - £90,000 based on experience.

How we use AI at Yoto: We think using AI to work smarter is part of the job. At Yoto, we use AI to help us move faster and reduce manual work so we can focus our time on creativity, problem-solving and impact. We don’t want to use AI to cut corners - it’s about smart usage that makes space for the work that really matters.

What you can expect from Yoto:

• Flexibility: Hybrid working - At least 1 day a week on average in our central London office. You are welcome and encouraged to come in more than this.
• Financial: Receive Income Protection, covering long term sickness for up to 2 years and company sick pay that increases with length of service.
• Health & Wellness: Private Medical Insurance via Aviva, or a Wellbeing Allowance to be used for memberships, subscriptions, treatment or therapy.
• Time Off: 25 days of holiday per year, plus bank holidays. On top of this, you also receive your birthday off, plus 1 extra day of holiday for every year worked after you hit your 2 year anniversary, up to 5 extra days.
• Helping Families: Variety of family-friendly leave, including enhanced maternity, paternity, adoption, fertility, pregnancy loss and carers leave.
• People & Planet: Up to 2 volunteer days a year. A Book Allowance of up to £50 a year to contribute to your professional development.
• Fun Perks: You receive your very own Yoto player and starter pack of cards! Regular company socials and celebrations, including our annual YotoFest!

Equity and Diversity: At Yoto, we love creating a world where childhood is rich with discovery and joy. We’re also passionate about building a workplace where everyone can thrive - both professionally and personally. We value flexibility and give our team the freedom to balance life and work in ways that suit them.