R-06 · RACD
RESEARCHFounding Data Platform Engineer, RACD
Ingest at source, no schema negotiation first. That sentence is easy to write on a website and is most of the engineering.
FULL-TIME · FOUNDING · REMOTE · OVERLAPPING HOURS
OPENINGS
1
One. When it is filled, this page comes down.
BASE SALARY
£220,000 to £360,000
The band, published. The offer is the same whether or not you push for more.
EQUITY
0.45% to 0.95% of RACD
Founding equity in the company you would actually work on.
01
The problem this role exists for
RACD promises to take signal as it is: metrics, logs, traces, industrial sensors, ticket systems, and protocols that predate most of the people reading this. The platform underneath has to accept all of it without asking a customer to normalise anything, and it has to keep the provenance of every point, because a correlation has to be explainable rather than merely asserted.
The Consensus Data Terminal borrows this platform through a versioned interface, so what you build serves two ventures. You sit on RACD, and that interface is a contract rather than a standing obligation to somebody else's roadmap.
More on the company itself: RACD →
02
Your first week, and a normal Tuesday
Week one you write a connector for a source nobody wants to touch, end to end, and put it in production. We will pick a genuinely awkward one on purpose, because it is the fastest way to understand what this product is actually promising.
A normal Tuesday: a customer's estate has been emitting something malformed for a month, and the interesting question is whether we drop it, repair it or represent the uncertainty. Then storage work, a cost review because this venture's economics are decided at ingest, and a versioned change to the interface the Terminal builds against.
WHAT YOU WOULD BE WORKING IN
A compiled language on the ingest path, a columnar or time-series store, a streaming layer, object storage, Kubernetes. Plus whatever protocol the customer's twenty-year-old sensor speaks, which is the part of this job nobody ever puts in a stack list.
We do not screen on tools. Nothing above is a requirement, and a stack list is a poor proxy for whether somebody can do the work. If you have gone deep in something else and would arrive with a view about why half of this is the wrong choice, that is an argument we would like to have.
03
What you would own
Not a ticket queue and not a slice of somebody else’s roadmap. Four things with your name against them in the decision log, from the first fortnight.
01
Ingestion
Connectors, back-pressure, and the sources that arrive malformed at four in the morning.
02
Storage
A representation that stays queryable at cardinalities where the obvious choices stop.
03
Provenance
Every point traceable to where it came from, because the alarm carries its chain.
04
The interface
The versioned contract the Terminal builds against, reviewed like any other.
04
What we are looking for
MINIMUM
What we would need to see
- ▸You have built ingestion that survived real, hostile, undocumented data sources
- ▸Depth in at least one of: streaming systems, columnar or time-series storage, query engines
- ▸You reason about the cost of a byte without being asked to
- ▸You have designed a schema or interface other teams built against, and lived with the consequences
PREFERRED
What would move you up the pile
- ▸Industrial protocols, IoT telemetry, or anything involving hardware that predates you
- ▸Data provenance or lineage work where somebody actually audited it
- ▸You have deleted a pipeline rather than adding a flag to it, and can explain how you got that agreed
- ▸Familiarity with open table formats and why the choice matters at this cardinality
Nothing in the preferred column is a filter, and neither list is applied before a human reads you. No degree is required for anything on this page, and we have hired people with doctorates and people with no degree at all into the same rooms. If you meet most of the minimum and not all of it, write anyway and say in the first paragraph which part you do not meet.
05
Pay, and everything around it
£220,000 to £360,000 base, plus 0.45% to 0.95% of RACD, reviewed upward annually without you having to ask. The band is published here rather than discovered three conversations in, and the offer is the same whether or not you negotiate, because the band is the band.
Everything else is what the whole group gets and is not negotiated per offer: a holiday floor rather than a ceiling, health and dental and vision for your family, sixteen to twenty weeks of parental leave for every parent, a funded setup, monthly paid group meetups somewhere in the world, one required funded trip abroad each year, a protected day a week on the research ventures, and no non-competes.
The full list, the salary band chart and the visa sponsorship map are on the careers page. We sponsor without qualification across seventeen jurisdictions and publish exactly which.
06
Apply for this role
Four steps: a conversation with somebody who would actually work with you, one real problem drawn from work we are genuinely doing, a working session on your solution, and a decision within a week of that session. The problem is paid if it runs long, and you keep the work either way.