Senior Data Engineer

Our everyday digital experiences are in the midst of a realtime revolution. Whether attending an event in a virtual venue, receiving realtime financial information, or working with colleagues in an online collaborative environment - consumers simply expect realtime digital experiences as standard. At Ably we’re not just witnessing this revolution - we’re powering it.

At the heart of our mission lies a commitment to putting developers first. Ably provides a suite of APIs to build, extend, and deliver powerful digital experiences in realtime, delivering billions of messages for millions of devices every day and supporting organizations like Split, Hubspot, Toyota and Genius Sports.

Working at Ably means helping to build the infrastructure and technology that will power and shape the future of the internet. The opportunity in front of us is immense. And we’d like your help.

About this role

As a Senior Data Engineer, you’ll play a pivotal role in driving Ably’s success by unlocking the full potential of our data and empowering teams to make informed decisions every day.

This role will sit within our Infrastructure team, who are responsible for designing, building and maintaining the infrastructure and tools that enable the platform. You’ll own our internal data processing pipelines, working cross-functionally with departments across the business to improve and enhance our platform and ensure every team has access to the data they need to be successful.

Day to day you will

• Drive data integration across engineering teams. You’ll collaborate with all engineering teams to gather and extract data from various internal systems and databases, ensuring seamless integration.
• Create and own Ably’s data analytics roadmap. You’ll establish the roadmap for data analytics within the organization, identifying the initiatives that will deliver the most value for the business and ensuring we have the long-term capabilities to meet our evolving data requirements.
• Synchronize data across departments. You’ll partner with Product, Marketing, Sales, Finance, Support and Customer Success teams to keep data synchronized between internal systems and SaaS products.
• Enhance decision-making with accurate data. You’ll work with internal teams to extract valuable data from existing databases and feed it into decision-making and reporting tools, supporting analysis and the creation of dashboards.
• Maintain and ensure effectiveness of our data infrastructure. You’ll ensure that our data reaches data warehouses/lakes, is available in our BI, decision-making and reporting tools, and work with teams to ensure it meets their analysis requirements.
• Establish data quality processes. You’ll implement tools and processes that ensure the quality of data across governance, lineage, and testing within the platform.
• Oversee data pipeline health. You’ll continuously monitor the health of various data processing pipelines to ensure smooth operation.
• Champion improvements to data quality. You’ll work with all teams across the company to enhance the quality of the data we collect, fostering a culture of data excellence.

It's important that you have

• Experience making architectural decisions for large data applications, and be well versed and a strong advocate of design patterns, where applicable.
• A solid understanding of data warehouse and data lake concepts and designs, with hands-on experience using and operating a data cloud (such as Snowflake). Ideally you’ll have experience dealing with high volume realtime data.
• A collaborative approach and a track record of successfully partnering with other teams on cross-functional initiatives to improve their data capabilities.
• Strong SQL skills and experience gathering data from relational databases, and working with the teams that own the databases to minimize the impact of breaking changes on the data pipelines.
• Programming skills in Go/Python. You’ll maintain and write services that sit in our data pipeline so you’ll need to be comfortable writing code.
• Experience with business intelligence and reporting tools (such as Metabase, Looker, DataStudio, etc.), with a track record of supporting analysts and other stakeholders and getting them productive quickly.
• Experience gathering data from HTTP APIs, handling errors, networking issues and unpredictable responses without impacting the data pipelines.
• Experience using modern ETL tools, or having written/maintained your own, to construct an ETL process that is flexible and responsive to change.

It would be great, but not essential if you have

• Experience delivering data pipelines on AWS, or other cloud providers is helpful, as is experience with the suite of tools we have deployed: Snowflake, Fivetran, dbt and Hightouch.
• Experience with infrastructure management and infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform.
• Data synchronization experience.Not all data pipelines will be used for reporting. Experience with reverse ETL tools or techniques will be helpful for future projects.

What’s it like to work at Ably?

We’re tackling planet-scale problems and our ambitions are a testament to that. You’ll join a successful, deeply motivated and collaborative team that thrives on innovation, experimentation and autonomy. To get a sense of life at Ably, visit our careers page. You can also read about the origins of Ably's core values on our blog.

We believe in fostering a culture that's built on inclusivity and mutual respect among all team members, and we recognise that each individual is different and will want to be supported in their role in different ways. We provide a range of perks and benefits to aid folks' development and wellbeing, allowing them to be their best selves and do great work.

• A remote-first and flexible work environment. UK-based teams come together in person once per month in our London hub (next to Old Street) and we get together as a company twice per year. Aside from that, you’re welcome to work wherever suits best for you.
• Equity. We’re a growing start-up and we want all team to members to share in the success of the company through our EMI share options programme.
• Enhanced holiday allowance. Our policy provides Ablyans with 28 days of paid annual leave (27 regular days, plus a day off to enjoy your birthday).
• Enhanced parental leave package, so that you can take the time you need to get to know your new family member, rest and recover.
• Home workstation budget of £500 on joining (and £150 p/a thereafter), so that your home office is set up to serve you well and that you have everything you need to work comfortably.
• Personal learning and development budget of £1000 annually, and 5% L&D time during working hours to focus on improving your skillset.
• Private healthcare with BUPA.
• Medical cash plan to cover a range medical and dental costs.
• Mental wellbeing coaching and counselling from Self Space.
• Monthly wellbeing budget via Juno.
• Life assurance and income protection.
• Access to Tech & Cycle to Work schemes.
• Weekly snack allowance for our end-of-week “Need To Know” meeting.
• A fully-paid one-month sabbatical after five years with Ably.

Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging at Ably

We believe our differences as individuals is what makes us great. Our people are at the heart of what we do, and we encourage everyone to be their most authentic self at Ably: we see inclusivity and openness as fundamental to creating long-term success as an organization. We encourage applications from all backgrounds regardless of age, disability, gender, sexual orientation, parental status, race, religion, educational background or neurodiversity. Ably has an amazing opportunity ahead of us, and we want anyone to be able to contribute to that opportunity.

If you enjoy working as part of a technology company, value open source, and love solving hard problems - then we’d love to hear from you, regardless of whether you fit the job description exactly or not. If in doubt, drop us an email; we’d be more than happy to give you some advice on your application.