Lead Data Engineer at LightWork AI

Lead Data Engineer

LightWork AI - VC-backed AI startup building the property management operating system

As the first senior data hire at LightWork AI, you will architect the data backbone for Felicity, an AI assistant automating 80-90% of property management workflows. You will design scalable pipelines, vector databases, and ML infrastructure, moving the company toward revenue in 2026 within a £33B market undergoing massive structural automation.

Location: London, UK

Why this role is remarkable:

• Rare opportunity to join as the foundational data lead, owning the entire architecture and strategy for a high-growth AI startup with 14,000 units already in pilot.
• Work directly under the Head of Engineering, Spyridon Katsoulis, who previously scaled a 140-person data department and led a $35M Series B.
• High-impact environment where your work directly enables an AI product that automates 75% of administrative tasks in a massive, underserved industry.

What you will do:

• Architect and build scalable real-time and batch data pipelines to support core AI products and operational workloads.
• Design and optimize systems for vector search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and machine learning data workflows.
• Establish engineering standards for data reliability, observability, and governance while mentoring the future data team as the company scales.

The ideal candidate:

• 7+ years of experience in data or backend engineering with a proven track record of building distributed data systems from scratch.
• Deep technical proficiency in Python and hands-on experience with PostgreSQL, NoSQL, and vector databases like Qdrant or Milvus.
• Strong architectural thinker who thrives in fast-moving startup environments and has experience with modern frameworks like Airflow, Kafka, or Spark.