About Nova Vet Family
Nova Vet Family is a growing veterinary technology scale-up, discovering and building digital tools that support clinical excellence and operational performance in veterinary practices. We are internalising our data platform as a critical next step in our growth.
About the Role
We are hiring a Senior Data Engineer to lead the migration of our core PostgreSQL database from an external vendor into our own AWS EU infrastructure, and to establish the foundations of our in-house data platform.
This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role and our first in-house data hire. It is explicitly designed as a stepping stone into a future data leadership position once the technical foundations are in place.
You will work closely day-to-day with product leadership and report into senior management.
Key Responsibilities
- Own and execute a zero-downtime PostgreSQL migration end-to-end from an external vendor to AWS, with comprehensive data validation and rollback strategies (target delivery: 36 months)
- Design and operate production-grade AWS infrastructure (RDS PostgreSQL, S3, IAM, monitoring and alerting) with security and reliability built in from day one
- Build and maintain reliable data ingestion pipelines using Python and SQL
- Implement data quality checks, automated monitoring, and basic lineage tracking
- Design backup and recovery strategies, including restore testing, and maintain clear operational runbooks
- Optimise database performance and AWS costs without compromising reliability
- Establish foundational data governance practices suitable for sensitive/clinical data, with strong GDPR awareness and EU data residency considerations
- As the first data engineer and future Dead Lead, set standards and best practices that will scale
Required Qualifications
- 35+ years of hands-on PostgreSQL experience, including query optimisation, backup/restore, and performance tuning
- Strong experience with AWS core services, especially RDS, S3, IAM, and CloudWatch
- Solid Python and SQL skills
- Experience working in GDPR-aware environments
- Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions preferred)
- Comfortable documenting and tracking technical decisions (Confluence, Jira)
- Comfortable communicating and working with non-technical stakeholders and external vendors
Strongly Preferred
- Experience with AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) or change data capture tools (Debezium)
- DevOps/SRE background with focus on observability and reliability engineering
- Experience with healthcare or clinical data
- Data governance or data stewardship experience
What We Offer
- High-ownership, high-impact role in a growing scale-up in an exciting and fast-changing market. Work on critical infrastructure that powers veterinary healthcare technology. You'll have autonomy to make architectural decisions, work with modern cloud-native tools, and directly impact system reliability and performance.
- Autonomy to shape core data infrastructure
- Clear progression into data leadership
- Competitive compensation and benefits (shared during process)
Interview Process
Shortlisted candidates will be asked to walk through practical technical scenarios similar to the challenges of this role.
