Data Engineer

Location: London, near London Bridge (3 days per week on-site)

Industry: NGO, Tech for Good

Salary: £60,000 - £80,000

Confidentiality: NDA required before client details can be shared

About the opportunity

This is a genuinely rare opportunity. We've already placed someone at this organisation this year and they're absolutely loving it and it's easy to see why. This is a mission-driven, not-for-profit working on real-world intelligence and research challenges that have direct, tangible impact. The kind of role where you go home knowing what you built actually matters.

The team is growing fast. You'll be joining a small but high-calibre Data, Tools, and Technical Tradecraft function that operates like a miniature start-up within a serious analytical organisation. Engineers here are given genuine creative liberty, you'll be expected to own features, propose new approaches, and help shape how the organisation exploits its growing data estate.

They work across large and varied datasets textual, geospatial, structured and unstructured powering a research team that is expanding rapidly. It's technically interesting, socially meaningful, and about as far from a maintenance job as you can get.

The role

You'll report directly into the Technical Tradecraft Lead and work closely with the Machine Learning Engineer to navigate new and unknown data sources, incorporate them into the organisation's Knowledge Base, and build the pipelines that make it all work. You'll be the primary point of understanding for a growing and diverse data collection that underpins the entire mission.

Key responsibilities

Understand, maintain and improve existing cloud-based pipelines and infrastructure
Build ad-hoc ingestion pipelines for structured data to reasonable turnaround times
Contribute to the technology strategy of the organisation
Support the research team in identifying, obtaining, and analysing data for investigations
Collaborate with the ML Engineer to model and incorporate new data sources

What we're looking for

Essential

2+ years of experience as a Data Engineer or similar role, building and maintaining data pipelines at scale
Strong Python skills, including familiarity with common data science libraries (NumPy, Pandas, Polars, etc.)
Experience with cloud-native system design GCP and BigQuery strongly preferred
Solid grasp of data structures and algorithms, including graph theory
Proficiency in SQL, including analysis and optimisation of large-scale queries
Motivated by both technical challenge and real-world social impact

Nice to have

Degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, or a related technical field
Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, OpenTofu)
DataOps and CI/CD pipeline design - especially with dbt or SQLMesh
Experience with Kubernetes, Airflow or Prefect
Experience deploying on-premises infrastructure
Exposure to geospatial, NLP, image processing, signals or financial data
Experience working in or alongside blended analyst teams

Benefits

£60,000 - £80,000 per annum
5% employee / 6% employer pension contribution
23 days holiday + 8 bank holidays + Christmas shutdown (outside of holiday allowance)
Enhanced maternity pay and occupational sick pay (4 weeks full pay)
Professional development support
Permanent full-time contract

How to apply

This role is being recruited exclusively through Inara Talent. Due to the sensitive nature of the organisation's work, a mutual NDA will be required before full company details are shared. This will be arranged during our initial screening call.

If this sounds like the kind of role you've been waiting for, get in touch. We'd love to tell you more.

At Inara Talent, we believe everyone deserves a fair chance to shine. We connect great people from all backgrounds with opportunities where they can thrive making sure hiring is fair, inclusive, and genuinely diverse. No matter your background, we focus on what matters: your talent.

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