Staff Data Platform Engineer (Data Platform)

Location: Hybrid, with at least one day per week on average in the central London office. Work from a different location for up to six weeks per year.

Salary: £80,000–£90,000 per year, based on experience.

Company

hirify.global is a screen-free interactive audio platform for children, combining connected audio players with a catalogue of more than 1,000 titles from creators, publishers, and music labels.

What you will do

• Own the architecture, reliability, and long-term health of the end-to-end data platform.
• Lead platform capabilities across GKE-hosted infrastructure, data ingestion, orchestration, transformation, and SQL workflows.
• Define the data platform roadmap and document technical investments, trade-offs, and architectural decisions.
• Partner with data science, analytics, product, and software engineering to turn business requirements into scalable platform capabilities.
• Set standards for data governance, access controls, data quality, and ownership.
• Manage and develop a mid-level data engineer while raising technical capability across the wider data team through reviews, documentation, and pairing.

Requirements

• Extensive hands-on experience in data engineering or analytics engineering with ownership of platform-level systems.
• Experience designing and operating production data platforms across cloud infrastructure, orchestration, ingestion, and transformation layers.
• Practical experience with GCP, BigQuery, Terraform, Kubernetes, Dagster, dlt, and dbt, or equivalent transferable tools.
• Ability to make and document architecture decisions involving meaningful trade-offs across teams or domains.
• Experience establishing technical standards for Python, SQL, and infrastructure code.
• Ability to define ambiguous technical problems, including what needs to be built and why.

Nice to have

• Previous line-management experience, including setting objectives and running performance conversations.
• Familiarity with GitOps practices in a data platform context.

Culture & Benefits

• High-trust environment with significant independence and opportunities to contribute to decision-making.
• Summer Hours policy and flexible hybrid working arrangements.
• Private medical insurance or a wellbeing allowance, employee assistance support, income protection, and life assurance.
• 25 days of annual leave plus bank holidays, birthday leave, additional service-based leave, and a sabbatical option.
• Enhanced family leave, workplace nursery savings, volunteer days, and a professional book allowance.
• Inclusive workplace with regular diversity, equity, and inclusion forums, plus company socials and a hirify.global player with starter cards.