Lead Data Engineer

About the role

Matchtech, a fast‑growing AI software company, is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to own and scale the data foundations behind its AI‑driven operations platform used by property teams. This hands‑on, high‑ownership position will define the data architecture, set engineering standards, and build systems that power product analytics and modern AI capabilities.

Key responsibilities

• Architect and build scalable data pipelines and distributed data systems.
• Design ingestion, transformation, and storage patterns for operational and AI workloads.
• Deliver batch and real‑time/streaming pipelines.
• Build and optimise vector search and retrieval pipelines supporting AI features.
• Implement monitoring, observability, and data‑quality frameworks.
• Drive security, reliability, and governance across the data layer.
• Partner closely with backend and AI engineers to support training, inference, and product delivery.
• Influence technical direction and help shape the future data team as the company scales.

Required profile

• Proven experience in data engineering or backend engineering with architecture ownership.
• Strong Python development skills.
• Extensive experience with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL, including performance tuning.
• Exposure to NoSQL systems.
• Comfortable building from scratch in a fast‑moving, product‑led environment.
• Experience with vector databases and vector search in modern AI systems.
• Desirable experience with Spark, Airflow, Kafka, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and event‑driven architectures.
• Cloud experience (AWS, GCP or Azure) is a plus.

Required skills

• Python
• PostgreSQL
• NoSQL databases
• Vector databases
• Spark
• Airflow
• Kafka
• Elasticsearch
• OpenSearch
• AWS
• GCP
• Azure

What we offer

• High impact and ownership as an early senior hire.
• Opportunity to work with a strong engineering team on real AI product challenges.
• Competitive salary.