About the Role
We're looking for a Staff Data Platform Engineer to join our Data team at Yoto, to help power insights and decision-making across the business. You'll set technical direction, raise the engineering bar across the data team, and shape how our data platform scales as Yoto grows.
Yoto is a screen-free interactive audio platform for kids. We make carefully connected audio players that kids control, with no microphones, cameras or ads. We're a growing team at the heart of all the decisions Yoto makes.
Responsibilities
•Own the architecture, reliability and long-term health of Yoto's end-to-end data platform, spanning GKE-hosted infrastructure, data ingestion, orchestration and transformation
•Define and maintain the data platform roadmap, translating company strategy into a sequenced set of technical investments with clear short- and long-term trade-offs documented
•Work across data science, analytics, product and software engineering to convert business requirements into platform capabilities, and ensure the platform serves company-wide use cases
•Set and enforce standards for data governance, access controls, data quality and ownership across the platform
•Manage and develop a mid-level data engineer directly, including regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and structured growth plans, while also raising technical capability across the wider data team through code review, documentation and pairing
Requirements
•Extensive hands-on experience in data engineering or analytics engineering, with a demonstrable track record of owning platform-level systems end-to-end, not just individual pipelines
•Experience designing and operating production data platforms across cloud infrastructure, orchestration, ingestion and SQL transformation layers
•Practical experience with GCP, BigQuery, Terraform, Kubernetes, Dagster, dlt and dbt or equivalent tools with the ability to articulate transferable reasoning
•Demonstrated ability to make and document architecture decisions that involve meaningful trade-offs across multiple teams or domains
•A track record of authoring and landing technical standards across Python, SQL and infrastructure code that other engineers, analysts and data scientists adopt in their day-to-day work
•Experience defining the scope of ambiguous technical problems — identifying what needs to be built and why, not just executing against an existing spec
Nice to Have
•Prior experience line managing an engineer, including setting objectives and running performance conversations
•Familiarity with GitOps practices in a data platform context
Conditions & Benefits
•Salary: 80,000–90,000 based on experience
•Hybrid working, at least 1 day a week on average in our central London office
•'Work from anywhere' policy to work from a different location for up to 6 weeks every year
•Summer Hours policy to use between the months of June and August
•Income Protection, covering long term sickness for up to 2 years, and company sick pay that increases with length of service
•Life Assurance cover from day one of your service
•Workplace Pension offering up to 3% employer contributions, following probation
•Generous employee referral bonus scheme
•Private Medical Insurance via Aviva, or a Wellbeing Allowance to be used for memberships, subscriptions, treatment or therapy
•Access to 24/7 Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) through WeCare
•Bike to work scheme to promote healthier lifestyles
•25 days of holiday per year, plus bank holidays
•Birthday off, plus 1 extra day of holiday for every year worked after your 2 year anniversary, up to 5 extra days
•After 4 years of service, eligible for sabbatical policy offering up to 3 months of unpaid sabbatical
•Variety of family-friendly leave, including enhanced maternity, paternity, adoption, fertility, pregnancy loss and carers leave
•Workplace nursery scheme, designed to support parents of preschool-aged children
•Up to 2 volunteer days a year
•Book Allowance of up to 50 a year to contribute to your professional development
•You receive your very own Yoto player and starter pack of cards!
•Regular company socials and celebrations, including our annual YotoFest!
