Lead Data Engineer at LightWork AI - AI-powered property management platform

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.