Senior Data Engineer

Senior Data Engineer – Contract Position – HIRING ASAP Location: London Bridge – In office 4 days per week Start Date: ASAP Duration: 3-4 months with extension Daily Rate: £400 - £450 per day Summary We require a high-agency Data Engineer who will sit directly alongside our clients Head of Data and Lead Data Scientist. You will actively shape their overarching data strategy, translate business objectives into high-value projects, and co-author Technical Design Documents (TDDs). Once the strategy is defined, you will personally execute at speed, writing production-grade Python, Dagster pipelines, and Terraform infrastructure to ship features end-to-end. Requirements • 4+ years commercial experience in Python distributed data engineering & systems backend development. • Hands-on production expertise with Dagster or Airflow in a Medallion or data lakehouse environment. • Production-grade Terraform experience managing AWS resources (EKS, Aurora PostgreSQL, IAM IRSA, VPCs). • Security-first engineering mindset (familiarity with enterprise audit constraints such as SOC2 or ISO27001). Bonus Skills • Experience with multi agent frameworks/libraries such as Google ADK or Langchain etc. • Experience building RAG pipelines, managing pgvector embeddings, or deploying LLM inference pipelines. • Infrastructure technologies - EKS and terraform Responsibilities Data Strategy & Architecture Leadership (Co-Ownership) • Partner with the Head of Data and Lead Data Scientist/Engineer to define overarching data lakehouse strategy, schema evolution, and vector retrieval architectures. • Translate top-down Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) into structured and detailed TDDs that satisfy Fortune 500 enterprise security and compliance standards. • Establish data governance, lineage tracking, and multi-tenant isolation patterns for agentic workflows. • Define JIRA Epics and user stories derived from approved TDDs to guide downstream implementation. Medallion Data Pipelines & Orchestration (Python & Dagster, AWS) • Architect, code, and deploy idempotent, backfill-safe data pipelines using Python and Dagster • Ability to utilise and work against AWS cloud environment • Enforce data lineage, schema evolution, and optimal Parquet/Delta partitioning across S3 storage layers.