Senior Data Engineer

• Employment type: Full-time

• Reporting to: Senior Engineering Manager

• Visa sponsorship: Must be UK-based. UK national or visa holder preferred, but sponsorship is not necessarily a dealbreaker

• Salary: £75,000 - £90,000

• Location/working pattern: Hybrid, London - 2 days a week in office

• Background checks: Due to the non-partisan nature of the work we do with global governments and partners, all employees need to pass background checks, verifying your identity, education (if relevant), work history, sanctions, criminal record, adverse financial history, and right to work. To ensure we maintain high standards of political neutrality, we also perform media and social media checks.

About Apolitical

Apolitical's mission is to make governments smarter for people and the planet and we reach over 40 million public servants through our partnerships with governments globally. We are the largest global network for governments, used by 500,000+ public servants in 170 countries to find and share best practices and gain skills on critical topics from AI to climate change to emerging technologies.

Governments use Apolitical to solve public sector transformation challenges from AI augmentation to reskilling. We offer governments five interoperable components: research and analysis, workforce productivity tools, customisable training, vibrant learning communities and high-impact convenings. Everything we do is powered by our unique global network and real-time data.

Apolitical is trusted by 60+ governments and leading organisations that work with governments. Governments include schools of government, departments, ministries and government-adjacent bodies in the UK, Canada, India, EU, UAE, Brazil, Ethiopia, Singapore and more. Global foundation partners include the Bezos Earth Fund, Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation, who view governments as key stakeholders in achieving systemic change.

Apolitical’s corporate partners include organisations such as Google, AWS and Microsoft, who work with us at scale with governments and public sector bodies worldwide.

Our flagship AI platform, Futura, helps governments identify where AI can make a difference and equips public servants with personalised learning to put it into practice. PolicyNova and PolicyNavigator support evidence-based policy research, while our Government AI Campus and Frontier Science & Tech and Resilience Platforms provide practical learning to help public servants respond to emerging challenges.

The Role

Apolitical is becoming a multi-module, AI-enabled platform for governments. More of our products now depend on data that is reliable, well governed and ready for AI, and our data estate is growing faster than our two-person data team can support.

Our data platform runs on Google BigQuery, with dbt Core for transformation, Airflow 3 on Cloud Composer for orchestration, Airbyte and custom Python pipelines for ingestion, Terraform for infrastructure and GitHub Actions for CI/CD. Some pipelines write back into live products, so a bad run can reach public servants, not just a dashboard.

As a Senior Data Engineer, you will take ownership of the infrastructure that brings data into our warehouse, keeps it moving reliably and makes it safe to use. Your immediate mandate is to increase what our data team can deliver by strengthening ingestion, data quality and governance, and to lay the foundations for governed self-serve and natural language querying.

This is a senior, hands-on individual contributor role with real ownership of technical decisions. You will work closely with the data team and Engineering, acting as the technical bridge between them, and with Product on the data behind our AI features.

You will:

• Own ingestion and integration – bring data into BigQuery from a varied source estate, including product databases, Contentful, HubSpot, Notion and LLM tracing tools, using Airflow, Airbyte and Python pipelines that fail loudly rather than silently.

• Run the data platform – operate orchestration, Terraform-managed infrastructure, containerised workloads and day-to-day BigQuery administration, including performance and cost.

• Write data back safely – own reverse-ETL pipelines from BigQuery into live systems such as HubSpot, Postgres and Pinecone, with safeguards that stop a bad run reaching users.

• Govern sensitive data – apply and extend role-based access control, column-level policy tags, PII conventions, retention and lineage, so our handling of public servants' data meets UK GDPR and partners' residency requirements.

• Model data for self-serve and AI – extend our 600+ model dbt project and design the semantic layer that lets Product, Partnerships and Delivery and other teams query governed data, including in natural language.

• Raise quality and engineering standards – extend our home-built data quality system and CI, record technical decisions clearly, and improve others' work through review and mentoring.

Onboarding Milestones

Within your first month, you'll:

• Set up your GCP, Airflow and dbt environment and develop a working understanding of our data estate, products and governance standards.

• Ship your first dbt model change and your first pipeline change to production.

• Establish working relationships with the data team and Engineering, and agree your first priorities with your manager.

Within three months, you'll:

• Have taken ownership of at least one ingestion pipeline end to end, from source to BigQuery.

• Be reviewing dbt and pipeline changes from across the data team.

• Have delivered a meaningful improvement to our data quality or CI tooling, such as bringing dbt slim CI into our GitHub Actions pipeline.

Within six months, you'll:

• Have improved the reliability, cost or performance of a core part of our BigQuery or Airflow infrastructure.

• Be a trusted technical partner to Engineering on data contracts, event instrumentation and shared initiatives.

• Have made measurable progress towards governed self-serve and natural language querying, and are establishing practices adopted across the data team and Engineering.

Ongoing

Success in this role is measured by the reliability and freshness of the pipelines you own, how many data quality issues are caught before they reach users or live systems, the cost and performance of our BigQuery estate, and how much more the data team can deliver because of the platform and standards you put in place.

About you

You will have experience building and operating production data infrastructure on a cloud data warehouse, owning pipelines end to end rather than working mainly on analytics or reporting. You will know enough of a modern data stack to be productive quickly and to make sound decisions about the rest.

You'll thrive here if you:

• Have personally built and owned production data pipelines, and can explain the design choices and trade-offs behind them.

• Bring strong SQL and data modelling, including dimensional modelling and production dbt with tests, version control and CI/CD.

• Treat data protection as part of engineering, applying access control, personal data handling and UK GDPR in practice.

• Make and own technical decisions, and explain the reasoning clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.

• Share knowledge and review others' work so that nothing depends on one person.

• Turn other teams' questions into scoped technical plans, and use AI tools thoughtfully in how you build and verify your work.

• Are motivated by building data infrastructure that helps public servants and governments work better.

Show us in your CV if you have:

• Experience designing data architecture for data residency or sovereignty requirements, or working with government data classifications.

• Experience connecting governed data to AI tools or natural language interfaces, or building semantic or metrics layers.

• Experience working directly with clients or partner technical teams on data delivery.

Don't meet every requirement? Studies show that women and people of colour are less likely to apply for roles unless they meet every qualification. We're committed to building a diverse and inclusive team, so if you're interested in the role but don't tick every box, we'd still encourage you to apply.

This probably isn't the role for you if…

• You want your work to centre on dashboards, stakeholder reporting and metric definition rather than infrastructure, pipelines and governance.

• You prefer a narrow remit that ends once data reaches the warehouse, or to work only on greenfield systems with the latest tooling.

• You prefer a predictable roadmap of clearly scoped tickets to helping define the solution in a small team where priorities can change.

Our application process

We use skills-based assessments and structured interviews to focus on what predicts success in the role. Each stage is designed to give us high-quality evidence of your skills, judgement and ways of working, while giving you a clear view of the role, the team and what working at Apolitical is like.

You can see more about the stages of our hiring process on our careers page.

You can expect to hear from us, no matter the outcome, by 6th November 2026.

Using AI in your application

We embrace new technologies and encourage the use of AI in our work.

You're welcome to use AI tools to help structure and refine your application. What matters to us, though, is understanding your thinking, experience and perspective, so please make sure your application still sounds like you.