Senior Data Engineer

This role is for a Senior Data Engineer in London, offering a contract of more than 6 months at a pay rate of £60,000-£80,000. Key skills required include Postgre

SQL, dbt, AWS, GDPR compliance, and experience in data warehouse design.

London, England, United Kingdom

Founded in 2001, Resident Advisor (RA) is one of the world’s longest-running music media brands and a cornerstone of the dance, electronic and DJ ecosystem. The site's audience of over 6 million monthly users is drawn in by a combination of news, editorial, club listings and ticketing, RA-branded events at venues and festivals worldwide, original films and a weekly mix series that has run for 18 years.

We’re looking for a Senior Data Engineer to own the stability, scalability, and correctness of our data platform. This is a foundational hire. The platform works today, but it has not been stress‑tested, and several of the controls that a scaling business needs, around security, governance, and warehouse design, are not yet in place. You will be the person who changes that.

You will inherit a functioning ETL pipeline built on top of Meltano and dbt, utilising a Postgre

SQL data warehouse on AWS and an engaged team. You will be expected to make the hard architectural calls that determine whether the platform can grow without rework. The right candidate will not just maintain our data systems, but make our foundations solid, make the platform AI‑compatible, and make the engineering team confident in what they are building on.

• Design, scale, and optimise the data warehouse as a foundation for both BI and AI. Make the architectural decisions that ensure the platform supports future ML use cases without rework.
• Own pipeline reliability end‑to‑end: monitor health, handle failures, build alerting frameworks, and maintain SLAs across all data ingestion.
• Implement and maintain GDPR controls, including PII masking, hashing, and row‑level security, making compliance a routine, engineered part of the stack.
• Define data contracts between producers and consumers, and use dbt lineage to run impact analysis before changes reach production.
• Build and maintain the dbt Semantic Layer so that business metrics are defined once and reported consistently across the organisation.
• Write the tests, the documentation, and the runbooks that make this platform operable by the whole team.
• Implement Slim CI and safe dev‑to‑prod workflows, and raise the overall engineering standard around deployment and change management.
• Work closely with Engineering, Product and Data Analytics to align on business objectives and build the optimal solutions for RA.

• Ideally +5 years hands‑on experience designing and scaling a data warehouse with engineering best practices, ideally Postgre
  
  SQL or similar. You have done this before, not just read about it.
• Deep proficiency in at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure). You understand how to leverage managed services to build scalable, resilient data infrastructure.
• Strong dbt skills: incremental models, Jinja macros, Semantic Layer, and the judgment to know when not to use dbt.
• Expert‑level SQL. You don’t just write queries; you optimise them. You are comfortable diving into execution plans, identifying indexing bottlenecks, and refactoring complex logic to minimise compute costs and maximise throughput.
• Experience architecting BI solutions:
  You’ve deployed and managed tools like Metabase, Tableau or Power
  
  BI, focusing on creating intuitive, high‑performance data environments for end‑users.
• Practical experience with data governance and GDPR compliance in an engineering context: PII handling, row‑level security, data contracts.
• A track record of building pipelines that don’t break quietly. You think about failure modes before they happen.
• AI awareness:
  You understand how architectural choices impact downstream ML. You know how to structure data to support future use cases like feature engineering and LLM orchestration (e.g., RAG).
• The ability to write clearly and document thoroughly. This role is as much about making the platform legible as it is about making it fast.
• Experience…