Data engineer for governments

Apolitical's mission is to make governments smarter for people and the planet and we reach over 40 million public servants through our partnerships with governments globally. We are the largest global network for governments, used by 500,000+ public servants in 170 countries to find and share best practices and gain skills on critical topics from AI to climate change to emerging technologies.

• Own ingestion and integration – bring data into BigQuery from a varied source estate, including product databases, Contentful, HubSpot, Notion and LLM tracing tools, using Airflow, Airbyte and Python pipelines that fail loudly rather than silently.
• Run the data platform – operate orchestration, Terraform-managed infrastructure, containerised workloads and day-to-day BigQuery administration, including performance and cost.
• Write data back safely – own reverse-ETL pipelines from BigQuery into live systems such as HubSpot, Postgres and Pinecone, with safeguards that stop a bad run reaching users.
• Govern sensitive data – apply and extend role-based access control, column-level policy tags, PII conventions, retention and lineage, so our handling of public servants' data meets UK GDPR and partners' residency requirements.
• Model data for self-serve and AI – extend our 600+ model dbt project and design the semantic layer that lets Product, Partnerships and Delivery and other teams query governed data, including in natural language.
• Raise quality and engineering standards – extend our home-built data quality system and CI, record technical decisions clearly, and improve others' work through review and mentoring.

• You will have experience building and operating production data infrastructure on a cloud data warehouse, owning pipelines end to end rather than working mainly on analytics or reporting.
• You will know enough of a modern data stack to be productive quickly and to make sound decisions about the rest.
• Have personally built and owned production data pipelines, and can explain the design choices and trade-offs behind them.
• Bring strong SQL and data modelling, including dimensional modelling and production dbt with tests, version control and CI/CD.
• Treat data protection as part of engineering, applying access control, personal data handling and UK GDPR in practice.
• Make and own technical decisions, and explain the reasoning clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Share knowledge and review others' work so that nothing depends on one person.
• Turn other teams' questions into scoped technical plans, and use AI tools thoughtfully in how you build and verify your work.
• Are motivated by building data infrastructure that helps public servants and governments work better.
• Будет плюсом: Experience designing data architecture for data residency or sovereignty requirements, or working with government data classifications; Experience connecting governed data to AI tools or natural language interfaces, or building semantic or metrics layers; Experience working directly with clients or partner technical teams on data delivery

• Employment type: Full-time
• Visa sponsorship: Must be UK-based. UK national or visa holder preferred, but sponsorship is not necessarily a dealbreaker
• Salary: £75,000 - £90,000
• Location/working pattern: Hybrid, London - 2 days a week in office
• Background checks: Due to the non-partisan nature of the work we do with global governments and partners, all employees need to pass background checks, verifying your identity, education (if relevant), work history, sanctions, criminal record, adverse financial history, and right to work. To ensure we maintain high standards of political neutrality, we also perform media and social media checks.