Senior Data Engineer

Ryft is an FCA authorised payment institution providing marketplace and platform payments infrastructure to merchants across the UK and EU. As Ryft scales through its next phase of growth, including EU expansion, we're investing in the data platform that underpins it — and this is the hire that builds it.

About the Job

We're hiring a Senior Data Engineer to own everything that happens to our data after it is written. The boundary with Software Engineering is drawn in one line: they own everything up to the write, you own everything after it — capture, ingestion, the bronze layer, and the data services that run on top. You'll build the change data capture and event-driven ingestion platform that gets data out of our source systems reliably, and hand a clean, contracted bronze layer to the analytics team.

This is a senior individual contributor role, hands‑on every day, working alongside the Data Lead and the Analytics Lead. Year one is build-heavy: CDC and event ingestion into S3 and delivering our warehouse migration end to end. Our current stack is AWS, RDS Postgres, Dagster, dbt, and Superset.

This is a hybrid role based in central Manchester, with 2 days per week in the office.

What you’ll do

• Build the ingestion layer: Capture change streams off our transactional stores into S3, alongside the domain events our services emit, so the warehouse reflects both current state and what happened to get there.
• Own the bronze layer: Land data reliably at a known latency, with schema evolution handled deliberately rather than survived. Replay and backfill should be routine operations.
• Hold the contract at the boundary: Agree with Software Engineering what crosses the write, in what shape, with what notice when it changes — then enforce it on your side, so a schema change is a handled event rather than an outage.
• Deliver the warehouse migration: Moving off Postgres is a priority for the next twelve months. You'll own it end to end, from evaluation through to cutover, and your view on the target platform carries real weight.
• Run what you build: Deployments, behaviour in production, observability, runtime cost, and reliability. We're expanding into the EU, so regional data residency is a design constraint from the start rather than a retrofit.

What we’re looking for

• Several years building and running production data platforms, comfortable being the most senior engineer on the platform day to day
• Real AWS depth in production, across S3, IAM, networking, and the ingestion and messaging services (Kinesis / Firehose, EventBridge, SNS, SQS, Lambda or equivalent)
• Hands‑on change data capture and event-driven ingestion — you understand delivery guarantees, idempotency, ordering, duplicates, and replay, and what each costs to get right
• Strong production Python and SQL, a cloud warehouse (Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery or similar), and an orchestrator (Dagster, Airflow or equivalent)
• You've run what you built, been called when it broke, and changed something structural afterwards — Git, pull requests, CI/CD and testing are defaults, not aspirations
• Comfortable working inside an infrastructure estate you don't own, and able to negotiate what you need from teams whose backlogs you don't control
• Pragmatic — you ship working things and know when a simple solution now beats an elegant one later

Nice to have

• Payments or fintech experience, particularly transaction, ledger, or reconciliation data
• Change data capture out of DynamoDB or a similar store
• A warehouse or platform migration behind you
• dbt familiarity, so you know how your outputs get consumed
• Multi-account AWS, data residency work, data contracts or schema registries

What you’ll get

• Near-greenfield platform ownership at an FCA-regulated payments business, with the ownership boundaries drawn and agreed — you'll spend your time building, not arguing about whose job something is
• Direct exposure to senior leadership, with real influence over the target architecture
• A seat at a fast-growing, well-funded fintech scaling in a genuinely underserved part of the payments market

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