Senior / Lead Data Engineer (AI-Focused)

• Design scalable ELT/ETL frameworks using DBT and cloud data warehouses
• Establish orchestration standards (Dagster or equivalent)
• Drive decisions across batch, streaming, and real-time pipelines
• Champion data modelling standards, semantic layers, and metric governance, * Architect data foundations supporting the ML lifecycle
• Design feature stores, embedding pipelines, and AI-ready datasets
• Enable MLOps workflows (data versioning, monitoring, retraining triggers)
• Support production inference (batch and real-time)
• Evaluate and integrate emerging AI tooling where strategically valuable
• Set best practices for testing, documentation, lineage, and observability
• Lead code reviews and mentor data & analytics engineers
• Drive CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code adoption
• Own platform reliability, performance optimisation, and cost efficiency
• Establish SLAs for data freshness and quality
• Partner with Data Science, Product, and Engineering leadership
• Translate business strategy into scalable data solutions
• Influence KPI and metric governance across teams
• Act as technical escalation point for complex data challenges

• Advanced SQL & Python
• Workflow orchestration (Dagster preferred)
• Cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, etc.)
• Data modelling for analytics and AI use cases
• API integrations and ingestion design patterns

AI / ML Infrastructure

• Feature engineering architecture
• ML pipeline and deployment workflows
• Experience supporting production ML systems
• Familiarity with embeddings, vector databases, LLM orchestration (desirable)
• Data observability and model monitoring

Platform & DevOps

• CI/CD for data workflows
• Docker / containerisation
• Infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform)
• Monitoring and alerting systems
• 6-10+ years in data engineering or related disciplines
• Proven experience architecting and scaling modern data platforms
• Experience enabling ML/AI production workflows
• Demonstrated technical leadership and mentoring
• Ability to influence senior stakeholders, * Architectural thinking with long-term vision
• The ability to balance innovation with reliability
• Clear communication across technical and non-technical audiences
• A strong ownership mindset and accountability for outcomes, * A scalable, reliable data platform powering AI and analytics growth
• Reduced ML time-to-production
• High levels of data quality, observability, and governance maturity
• Improved cost-performance efficiency across the data stack
• A strong, growing data engineering capability within the team

This is a high-impact leadership role within a forward-thinking technology environment where AI and data are core to the business strategy.

PaymentGenes is proud to be partnering with a high-growth, international technology organisation to appoint a Senior / Lead Data Engineer (AI-Focused). This is a strategic hire for a business investing heavily in AI-enabled products and advanced analytics. If you are passionate about architecting modern data platforms that power real AI at scale - this opportunity is for you.

This is more than a data engineering role! You will define and scale the organisation’s data platform to power advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI-driven products. Combining deep technical expertise with architectural leadership, you’ll shape long-term data strategy while remaining hands-on in building robust, production-grade systems.

You will be accountable for platform reliability, scalability, governance, and AI enablement across the business.