Wave Group
Founding Data Engineer
Requirements
Candidates must have 3-6 years of experience building data pipelines and ML systems in production, with a focus on AI-native environments. A strong emphasis on data quality and experience in small teams is also required.
Job Description
💻 Job Title: Founding Data Engineer
💰 Salary: up to ~£120k + profit share
📈 Equity: 0.75 - 1%
📍 Location: Old Street (4-5 office days/week)
🔐 Company: Data processing AI Agents
👥 Team: ~5
💸 Funding: Pre-seed
About the company
This early stage start-up is processing hundreds of thousands of unstructured financial documents into clean, structured datasets for some of the world's largest financial institutions - producing the output of 50, with a team of 5.
Forecasting £1.5m revenue within their first 12 months, they have an immense potential - not based on hype or inflated valuations, but rather achieving mega productivity through intelligent application of AI agents.
Their mid term goal is ~£50m revenue with a sub-30 person team. What's in it for you?
- Profit share. Cash in your account on regular basis - not a promise of a huge payout IF the company succeeds and sells.
About the role
You'll own data infrastructure end-to-end - ingestion, transformation, storage, delivery.
The current agent system works. Your job is to scale it: more documents, more asset classes, more clients. You'll make architecture decisions, push the boundaries of agentic tooling and ship data as a product to institutional buyers who rely on it for decisions that move millions.
Full ownership from day one, with a genuine progression trajectory for the right person.
This is a predominantly backend/infra DE role. No dashboards, no stakeholder reporting - just the engine that powers everything. You'll be the most senior person in your domain from day one, with no one above you in this function - and a clear path to leadership later down the line.
✅ Must have requirements:
- Roughly 3-6 years experience building performant data pipelines and ML systems in production at a company where data is the core product, not a support function
- Genuinely AI-native experience: Claude Code, Cursor or equivalent as your daily environment - not occasional experiments
- Python, Postgres, async, queues - fluent and battle-tested
- Experience in a small team (2-30 people) where you owned the whole function without a safety net
- Data quality obsessive - inconsistencies bother you until they're fixed, not flagged and forgotten
👍 Bonus points for:
- Experience at a financial data provider (Bloomberg, Refinitiv, Preqin, FactSet etc.) or quant finance
- Experience with LLMs in production / agentic workflow design
- Web scraping and document parsing at scale
- Staff/Principal-level IC ownership at a larger org
🛂 VISA sponsorship is available if needed (but you need to be already living in the UK)
Skills
About Wave Group
Wave enables companies to scale. Our mission is clear. Fuel growth by building the teams and advisory support behind it. We combine talent and consulting to solve the same problem. How you hire. How you structure. How you move. We connect tech, product and data talent with companies shaping what’s next. From critical hires to full team builds. We provide consulting across hiring strategy, team design and market insight. Practical guidance. Clear decisions. Better outcomes. Our approach is human and precise. Defined search. Structured delivery. Straight advice. With over 1,000 public LinkedIn testimonials and 300+ partnerships, the work holds up.. Curious to learn more? hello@wavetalent.co www.wave-group.io/