Tech Lead - Steaming - Kafka - London - £1000pd Outside IR35

The role

We're looking for a strong, hands-on Tech Lead to help build a Real Time commodity intelligence platform from the ground up. This is a generalist data/platform engineering role. You'll design the architecture and write the production code behind it.

The work cuts across streaming, graph, time-series and large-scale data. If you like hard problems and want to own the technical direction of something new, this is it.

What you'll be doing

• Designing and building Real Time streaming pipelines on Kafka
• Architecting a lakehouse platform using Apache Iceberg
• Building high-performance analytics over large-scale and temporal (time-series) data
• Developing knowledge graphs, semantic models and ontologies to give the data structure and meaning
• Bringing AI and agent-based reasoning into the platform
• Designing distributed systems that scale, and writing production-grade code to deliver them
• Setting technical direction and standards as the platform grows

What you'll bring

• Strong hands-on experience as a data or platform engineer, at Tech Lead level or close to it
• Deep Kafka and Real Time streaming experience
• Experience with Iceberg or other lakehouse technologies
• A track record of designing and building distributed systems
• Experience with time-series/temporal data and high-performance analytics
• Exposure to knowledge graphs, semantics or ontologies
• Interest in AI/agent reasoning and how to apply it to real data problems
• Comfortable switching between architecture and code, and keen to work across the whole stack

Nice to have

• Commodities, energy or trading background
• Experience building a platform from scratch

Interested?

If that sounds like you, or someone you know, get in touch.