Senior Data Engineer

About the Role

This role is being recruited for by Vecta, on behalf of one of our partner companies.

Our client is a UK delivery operation moving over a million newspapers a week, alongside parcels and essentials, for clients like Morrisons and Amazon. They've been doing this for two decades. The business works — profitably, at scale, every single day — and most of how it works lives in operational systems, spreadsheets, and the heads of people who've been there a long time.

They're now investing seriously in data. Not dashboards for the sake of dashboards. Real infrastructure that lets us price routes properly, forecast demand accurately, and run the operation smarter than instinct alone allows. This is the role that builds that.

You're coming into a business with 20+ years of operational data living across legacy systems, MySQL, Postgres, RDS, spreadsheets, and tribal knowledge. None of it was designed to be analysed. Most of it has never been questioned. This is greenfield infrastructure on top of a brownfield business. The harder half of the job isn't picking the tools — it's understanding two decades of operational reality well enough to model it properly.

The Remit

• Understand the existing world. Sit with operations, finance, and the CEO/CTO. Pull apart how the business actually runs. Figure out where the truth lives and where it doesn't.
• Design the new world. A modern data platform — Airbyte, Snowflake, dbt, AWS — modelled around how this business actually operates, not how a textbook says it should.
• Build it. End to end. Ingestion, modelling, warehousing, serving. You own the architecture and the execution.
• Make it the source of truth. So that pricing decisions, route planning, client reporting, and forecasting all run off the same trusted layer.

Responsibilities

• Build the data platform end to end: ingestion (Airbyte), warehousing (Snowflake), transformation (dbt), and serving on AWS
• Pull from operational systems (RDS, MySQL, Postgres) and a long tail of legacy sources, and turn them into clean, trustworthy models
• Spend serious time with operations leaders understanding what the data means before deciding where it goes
• Define metrics properly. Push back when a number doesn't reflect reality. Make the warehouse the place people trust
• Partner directly with the CEO and CTO to figure out what questions the business should be asking — and build the data to answer them
• Set the standard for data quality, lineage, and observability from day one
• Make architectural decisions that scale for the next decade
• Eventually grow and lead a team around you as the function expands

Requirements

• 5+ years of data engineering experience, having built and owned production data platforms
• Strong with the modern data stack: Airbyte, Snowflake, dbt or equivalent, AWS
• Comfortable across operational databases: RDS, MySQL, Postgres
• Strong Python — pipelines, transformations, tooling
• You treat data as a product. You ask what a metric means before you build it
• You're good with messy reality. Legacy systems, undocumented logic, and "we've always done it this way" don't put you off — they're the interesting part
• Excellent communicator. You can sit with a 25-year ops veteran, understand how routing actually works, and translate that into a data model
• Ready to step into ownership of an entire data function, not just a slice of one
• Thrive with autonomy and care about craft

How We Work

• Fully remote. Async by default, with regular calls to whiteboard the model, work through design decisions, and pair on the hard problems.
• This is a rare setup: enterprise stability with the pace of a well-funded startup. The business has made its money. Now it's investing in engineering talent to build something exceptional. In a company of several hundred staff, you'll have direct access to the CEO and CTO from day one. No layers. No politics. Just thoughtful engineering at pace.
• You'll be the most senior data person in the room from day one. You set the architecture. You define how the business uses data. You grow the function from here.

Location and Compensation

Remote (MUST relocate or be already based in Cyprus)

Salary: €55,000 – €80,000 + bonus

Tech Stack

Airbyte, Snowflake, dbt, AWS, RDS, MySQL, Postgres, Python