Level: 4

Salary band: £70,000 - £90,000

Bonus: 8% performance-based, discretionary

Location: Hybrid (work from our London office 2x/wk)

At Automata, we're on a mission to transform how scientists work by making automation accessible to every lab in the world. We believe that by giving labs the power to automate, we can unlock discoveries that will shape the future of life sciences—from diagnostics and drug discovery to synthetic biology.

But we’re more than just a company disrupting the industry—we're a team of innovators, problem-solvers, and creators passionate about empowering scientists. Our LINQ platform combines hardware and software to streamline workflows, making lab automation fast, flexible, and affordable. This means our customers can focus on groundbreaking research, while we take care of the rest.

Why Work at Automata?

• Impact: Your work will directly contribute to advancements in science and medicine, supporting labs around the globe as they push boundaries in research and innovation.
• Innovation: You’ll be part of a team solving complex problems, using cutting-edge technology.
• Growth: We invest in our people. Whether through hands-on experience, professional development, or collaborative projects, you’ll grow both professionally and personally.
• Community: Join a diverse, passionate team that values collaboration.

We're looking for a Senior Data Engineer based in London to join our Data Team to help shape the future of the data infrastructure that powers our innovative lab automation systems.

Our mission is to build lab automation products at the intersection of hardware and software in the life-sciences automation space that can transform the industry, accelerating science.

About the team

Our engineers are more than just technically skilled; they're driven by curiosity and a growth mindset. They find immense joy in seeing the software power the robots and the hardware bench, transporting plates from instrument to instrument. They understand the profound impact of their work on the life sciences industry, and this fuels their passion.

The core skills we seek:

• Expertise in Python and SQL for data processing, analysis and automation.
• Proficiency in building and maintaining batch and streaming ETL/ELT pipelines at scale, employing tools such as Airflow, Fivetran, Kafka, Iceberg, Parquet, Spark, Glue for developing end-to-end data orchestration leveraging on AWS services to ingest, transform and process large volumes of structured and unstructured data from diverse sources.
• Strong knowledge of SQL/NoSQL databases and cloud data warehouse technology such as Snowflake/Databricks/Redshift/BigQuery, including performance tuning and optimisation.
• Understanding of best practices for designing scalable and efficient data models, leveraging dbt for transformations.
• Familiarity with CircleCI, Terraform or similar tools for deployment and infrastructure as code.

In this role, you will be responsible for:

• Shipping and building a scalable data product consisting of high-performance data pipelines and infrastructure that power our lab automation products and services.
• Driving best practices and standards in ensuring data quality, governance and integrity is in place across the platform, optimising for scalability and cost-efficiency.
• Taking pragmatic approaches and keeping it simple by solving for problems that we have, not for problems we might encounter.
• Collaborating and supporting your team because code is just one part of the job, but being a team player is a massive part. We prioritise working together with product partners, data analysts and engineering to ensure transparency and alignment in our direction.

What it takes:

• Production experience across the core technology stack of Python and SQL for data scripting and transformation, data engineering tools for pipeline development and orchestration and running on cloud infrastructure such as AWS.
• Delivery-focused and pragmatic in ensuring customer value is delivered efficiently, with necessary trade-offs considered, balancing strategic direction, quality and resiliency.
• Team multiplier and collaborative problem solver who contributes to up-skilling the team, helping to resolve issues, sharing knowledge, and elevating others around you.
• Have a product mindset, always keen to understand customer needs. Participate in product and design discussions, contributing ideas to ensure we do the most impactful work that will improve the product and user experience.

Comfortable dealing with ambiguity, thinking through the problem space, shaping the product, seeking feedback, and adjusting the product through iterations.

We are an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. Discrimination of any kind based on race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status is strictly prohibited.