Data Engineer

About us

The Role

As we rapidly scale our organisation, our challenge is no longer just what we build, but how fast and effectively we evolve as an organisation. That requires clarity, instrumentation, and the ability to learn continuously from signals across the entire business.

To support this, we are building a dedicated Telemetry capability: the systems, metrics and signals that let us objectively understand performance, risk and progress — and act on them at speed.

As a Data Engineer, you will be responsible for building and operating the technical foundations that allow PhysicsX to measure performance, detect early warning signals, accelerate decision-making, and enable intelligent automation.

This role sits within the Strategy & Programs team but operates across Delivery, Product, Research and Operations. You will work as both a technical builder and a strategic partner — shaping how we define success, how we measure it, and how we use data and signals to improve.

You will own telemetry end-to-end: from ingesting structured and unstructured data, to modelling business-critical metrics, to designing how insights are consumed by leadership — whether through dashboards, reports, or AI-assisted interfaces.

This is not a traditional BI or reporting role. You are responsible for helping the company answer a fundamental question: are we winning — and how do we know?

Your Impact

You will create PhysicsX’s single, trusted view of organisational performance, enabling leadership to move faster with confidence.

Your work will:

• Reduce decision latency across the company
• Surface risks and bottlenecks early as we scale
• Replace fragmented, manual reporting with durable systems
• Enable continual improvement by measuring whether change actually leads to progress
• Lay the foundation for automation and AI-enabled ways of working

Over time, this role becomes a critical lever in how PhysicsX scales intelligently.

What You Will Do

Build Telemetry Foundations

• Design and implement scalable telemetry infrastructure to capture and manage:
• Operational metrics across Delivery, Product, Research and Operations
• Financial and commercial performance data
• Employee feedback and people signals
• External signals such as competitor activity, market trends and public data
• Evaluate, select and justify the underlying technical infrastructure and tooling required to support this capability, balancing speed, scalability, cost and long-term sustainability.
• Work with internal teams and external contractors to integrate data from SaaS systems (e.g. ATS, HRIS, CRM, finance tools).
• Ensure telemetry is reliable, well-governed, and sustainable as the business scales.

Model How the Business Works

• Partner with leadership and functional owners to define:
• Company-wide KPIs and targets
• Leading and lagging indicators
• How metrics relate to each other across the business
• Establish shared metric definitions, ownership and governance.
• Ensure telemetry reflects how PhysicsX actually operates, not just what is easiest to measure.

Design Insight as a Product

• Treat the consumption of telemetry as a product with real users.
• Decide how insights should be delivered based on audience and decision context:
• Dashboards for monitoring and review
• Structured reporting for planning cycles
• Conversational or agent-based interfaces for leadership
• Evaluate and experiment with emerging AI-native tools that make organisational performance and metrics accessible through agents and natural language, assessing when to build, buy or integrate.
• Optimise for decision-making speed, clarity and relevance, not volume.

Enable Automation and AI-Driven Scale

• Build telemetry that supports increasingly ambitious automation — with and without LLMs.
• Help define how PhysicsX uses AI to scale:
• Reducing repetitive work
• Increasing leverage of existing teams
• Creating space for higher-value problem solving
• Evaluate and experiment with emerging agentic platforms designed to automate internal processes and accelerate our scaling journey.
• Define how success of automation is measured, ensuring it contributes meaningfully to growth and scale.

Operate as a Strategic Partner

• Work closely with Delivery, Product, Research and Operations to:
• Identify gaps in measurement and instrumentation
• Improve data quality and signal coverage
• Replace manual or ad-hoc processes with repeatable systems
• Report to leadership on performance, trends, risks and learning.
• Use telemetry to inform strategic decisions — not just describe outcomes.

Must-Have Skills & Experience

• Experience building end-to-end data or telemetry systems in roles such as:
• Data Engineer
• Analytics Engineer
• Business Intelligence Engineer
• Platform or Internal Tools Engineer
• Strong SQL skills and experience with cloud data platforms (e.g. BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Postgres).
• Hands-on experience ingesting data via APIs and integrating SaaS systems.
• Experience designing semantic layers, metric models or business-facing abstractions.
• Ability to translate company strategy and operational reality into measurable systems.
• A systems mindset: you build for scale, durability and change.
• Comfort working with senior technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Great if you also have

• Experience with major data ecosystem stacks. e.g. AWS / Google Cloud / Azure.
• Familiarity with ETL/ELT tools (e.g. Airbyte, Fivetran, dbt, Dataform).
• Experience working with unstructured data, vector search, or retrieval-augmented systems.
• Exposure to internal tooling, automation platforms, or agent-based systems.
• Strong interest in AI-enabled automation and the future of work.
• Experience in high-growth or deep-tech environments.

Additional Considerations

• This role is based in our London office, with an expectation of being in the office at least three days per week.
• Occasional travel to other PhysicsX locations may be required.

What We Offer

• Equity options – share in our success and growth.
• 10% employer pension contribution – invest in your future.
• Free office lunches – great food to fuel your workdays.
• Flexible working – balance your work and life in a way that works for you.
• Hybrid setup – enjoy our new Shoreditch office while keeping remote flexibility.
• Enhanced parental leave – support for life’s biggest milestones.
• Private healthcare – comprehensive coverage
• Personal development – access learning and training to help you grow.