Data Engineer (11-months FTC Maternity Cover)

Save My Exams is a rapidly growing EdTech business on the lookout for a Data Engineer to cover maternity leave. We are an exciting, customer-obsessed, remote-first startup that is improving the lives of millions of students every year.

Reaching more than 4 million users every month, all while being bootstrapped and profitable, we’re looking for a  Data Engineer  to join our team and help grow and engage our community across social media channels. 
We are passionate about solving challenging and meaningful problems and looking for people who care about making a real difference in the lives of students and teachers.  

So, if you’re interested in joining a rapidly scaling, product-led, customer-obsessed business, and having the chance to disrupt a $7tn+ market by improving the lives of millions of students every year, then read on.

Check out our Trustpilot! This is an 11-month fixed-term contract covering maternity leave. You'll be our only Data Engineer, taking full ownership of the data platform for the whole business.
To love this role, here's the type of person you are:

• You enjoy owning a data platform end-to-end, this includes ingestion, modelling, orchestration and activation and take as much pride in keeping it reliable as in extending it.
• You're comfortable being the sole data engineer in a company: setting the standards, making the technical decisions, and acting as the go-to person for anything data engineering.
• You bring software engineering discipline to data work. Best practices such as version control, code review, CI/CD, automated testing and infrastructure as code are your defaults, not extras.
• You're pragmatic, balancing engineering rigour with business reality and choosing the simplest solution that solves the problem well.
• You enjoy working directly with non-technical stakeholders, translating their questions and requirements into well-modelled, trustworthy data.
• You'd enjoy supporting a product that directly helps millions of students across the world, and you like the ambiguity, pace and opportunity that comes with a relatively small company.
  
  

Your Responsibilities:

Over the next 11 months, you'll:

• Own and run our data platform end-to-end: ingesting data from third-party APIs, internal databases and event streams into Snowflake, transforming it with dbt, and orchestrating everything on AWS.
•  Keep the platform secure, reliable, cost-efficient and maintainable. Including monitoring pipelines, responding to alerts, resolving data quality issues and optimising warehouse performance and spend.
• Work with our Insights & Analytics team to define data models and provide clean, transformed data that's ready for analysis.
• Deliver data to stakeholders across the business, including reverse ETL syncs into third party tools.
• Maintain the infrastructure behind our internal data products, including our semantic layer and AI-powered self-serve analytics tooling.
• Be the decision-maker for data engineering: prioritising a backlog, making architecture and build-vs-buy calls, and evaluating vendors and tooling.

• Strong professional experience in data engineering or analytics engineering, with the seniority to operate autonomously as the sole owner of a data platform.
• Expert SQL and data modelling skills, with production experience running dbt at scale (testing, incremental models, macros, documentation).
• Experience administering a cloud data warehouse, ideally Snowflake, including access control, performance tuning and cost management.
• Experience building and orchestrating pipelines with CI/CD and infrastructure as code (we use GitHub Actions and Terraform).
• Python programming skills, able to write clean, maintainable, production-ready pipeline code.
• Comfort managing your own priorities: triaging requests from across the business, communicating trade-offs clearly, and delivering against agreed timelines.
• An ownership mindset and an attitude of taking responsibility for the platform, data and code you ship.
• Excellent oral and written communication skills, including writing documentation others can rely on.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with AWS (we use Glue, Step Functions, Lambda, ECS)
• Experience with reverse ETL into CRM and advertising platforms (e.g. Meta, TikTok and Google Ads).
• Familiarity with Tableau or similar BI tools, and with marketing, subscription or revenue data.
• Experience in the EdTech space or in Education in general.

Working for a fast-growing, bootstrapped education company is a rare opportunity to build a hugely impactful and sustainable business.

Our positions are challenging, but also come with amazing advantages and opportunities.

Here’s what we offer:

• Competitive annual salary of £75,000 - 100,000 , depending on experience & skills. (Pro rata’d for the length of the contract)
• Company pension scheme, with the option to opt into the salary sacrifice scheme
• 36 days of annual leave, which includes the UK bank holidays, but you can take them whenever suits you (pro-rata’d for the length of the contract)
• Bonus scheme
• Life insurance
• Enhanced maternity & paternity leave
• £500 annual learning & development budget (pro-rated for the length of the contract).
• Cycle to work scheme
• Flexible working hours: We don’t expect (or want) you to spend every waking hour at work. Our general working hours are 9–6pm, however we have a company-wide principle around Core Hours, which is 10–4pm and you can work at times that suit you and your team
• Remote working: we’re UK based but you can work from your home or wherever you want
•  A people-first culture - we’re driven to work hard but we also have fun, with company coffee coolers, as well as bi-annual get-togethers in person and virtual socials 

Process
Here’s an overview of our hiring process, so that you know what to expect. We aim for a fast and straightforward process.

Stage 1: CV Application. 
Stage 2: An initial interview with the current Data Engineer
Stage 3: Assessment task to be completed at home
Stage 4: An interview with a couple of  members of the team 
Stage 5: Final interview with CTO