Engineering Lead Data, Search & AI

Position: Engineering Lead – Data, Search & AI

About the Role

We are looking for an experienced Engineering Lead to own the technical roadmap, strengthen data and search capabilities, and lead a team of engineers developing AI-enabled products and data-driven solutions.

This role will work closely with Product, Sales and domain experts to translate complex data and business requirements into practical engineering solutions, from initial concepts and prototypes to production-ready applications.

We are looking for a strong technical leader who can build and develop a team while remaining hands-on in coding, debugging and technical problem-solving when needed.

What You'll Own

• Technical Strategy and Roadmap: Assess existing systems, identify architectural gaps and define a technical roadmap across data, search and AI. Prioritise investments and determine what to improve, simplify, replace or rebuild.
• Data and Search Engineering: Lead work across data ingestion, processing, normalisation, knowledge modelling, indexing and retrieval. Establish standards for data quality, coverage, freshness and search relevance.
• Production Excellence: Set engineering standards for system design, testing, deployment and observability. Improve system reliability, performance and cost, including the development and productionisation of AI applications.
• Hands-on Technical Leadership: Stay technically involved and step in when needed to write code, debug issues, review architecture and resolve complex engineering problems.
• Product and Business Collaboration: Partner with Product, Sales and domain experts to translate customer needs, specialised knowledge and raw data into technical plans, prototypes and practical solutions. Support POCs and customer-facing demonstrations.

Job Requirements

• Proven Engineering Management: Experience leading engineers through team building, hiring, development and performance management.
• Technical Roadmap Ownership: A track record of defining and executing technical roadmaps for complex, data-intensive products or platforms, from identifying problems through to delivery.
• Data and Search Expertise: Substantial experience building or leading production data platforms, pipelines, search or retrieval systems, with a strong understanding of data quality, indexing and relevance.
• Strong Engineering Fundamentals: Sound architectural judgement across backend services, databases, distributed systems and APIs, with practical experience operating reliable production systems.
• Hands-on Technical Credibility: Strong production engineering experience in backend, data or search systems, with proficiency in relevant languages such as Java, Go, Scala, Python, Rust or C++. Able to review code, write code and debug complex issues when needed.
• Product-oriented Leadership: Able to translate ambiguous requirements into actionable engineering plans, make pragmatic trade-offs and communicate clearly across Engineering, Product, Sales and other stakeholders.