Data Platform Engineer

We live in a world that runs on physical industries like energy, logistics, manufacturing. These sectors are essential to our economy and daily lives, yet they are held back by inefficiencies, fragile legacy systems, and decades-old ways of working. This is not just a business problem; it is a societal one. When grids fail, supply chains stall, or factories falter, entire economies are disrupted.

These companies face unique, complex challenges that typical software was never designed to solve. Cogna was founded to change this. Our mission is to give critical industries their own AI-powered Software Factory: a way to build and deploy bespoke digital tools that solve pressing operational challenges.

Since our launch in May 2023, we’ve seen incredible customer traction and revenue growth. We’re backed by leading VCs, including Notion Capital and Hoxton Ventures, and we’re building a world-class team to take on one of the most important challenges of our time.

Tackling challenges at this scale takes people who are curious, adaptable, and motivated by impact. If our mission resonates with you, we encourage you to apply, even if your experience doesn’t match every requirement. We are committed to building a diverse team that reflects the industries and societies we serve.

Overview

We are looking for a mission-driven, technology-savvy and delivery-focused Senior Data Engineer. Your role will be dual: you will put in place Cogna’s BI infrastructure (data ingestion, data warehouse, and reporting capabilities) and come up with the data architecture for Cogna’s internal performance and productivity metrics; you will architect and implement the scalable ETL layer that will allow us to eventually support many tens of thousands of applications we’ll develop for our customers, capable of running hundreds of thousands of ETL jobs daily.

What you’ll do

• Work with Product and Engineering leaders to define the needs for Cogna’s BI infrastructure and come up with a clean data architecture.
• Implement a state of the art data collection, data warehouse and reporting solution that will help us track and optimize internal productivity metrics as well as external metrics for our apps. This will allow us to best direct our AI and toolchain development efforts.
• Architect and implement a scalable ETL layer that will be used by our apps. This will need to scale to tens of thousands of apps eventually, thus supporting hundreds of thousands of ETL jobs per day.This layer needs to integrate tightly with our DSL (Domain Specific Languages) specifications for apps, and be able to deliver the agreed SLAs. It will support the required monitoring, alerting, and status reporting capabilities.
• Contribute to fostering an engineering and operations culture that encourages constant innovation and high-quality delivery standards, while shipping fast.

What we’re looking for

• You are highly technical and results-driven. You have a strong ability to define and drive change.
• You have the drive to work at an early-stage (Series A) startup. You thrive in a fast-paced, quickly changing, and independent environment that you are able to shape.
• You have experience with large-scale infrastructure (hundreds or thousands of instances, tens of thousands of QPS).
• You’re very familiar with distributed systems in general and with distributed data frameworks in particular, and have a good understanding of systems design for scalability.
• You’re experienced with off the shelf ETL solutions (such as Dagster or Matillion) and with infrastructure automation.
• You have 3+ years experience in Business Intelligence Engineering, Data Engineering, or Data Analysis roles, building data pipelines and analyzing large datasets. You have expertise in reporting/visualization and using data insights.
• You’re very proficient in SQL and Python.
• You have an excellent understanding of development processes and best practices like engineering standards, code reviews, and testing.
• You’re humble and lead with open, candid and collaborative relationships. You’re comfortable discussing your challenges and improvement areas.
• You have a degree in Computer Science or a related field, or are a self-taught person who excels in this area.
• Special note about diverse candidates and career breaks: we welcome diverse candidates and candidates with career breaks and CV gaps (life happens, we get it!).

What we offer

• Competitive salary and share option plan
• 25 days annual leave, plus public holidays
• Excellent pension scheme, company contribution fixed at 7.5%
• Private healthcare, including family cover and pre-existing conditions
• Flexible hybrid working with 2 days per fortnight in our Farringdon office, but different schedules and locations can be negotiated.
• Regular social events and offsites
• Access to a gym and fitness classes in our office building