Senior Data Engineer

🚀 We’re on a mission to make real estate transactions smarter, faster, and friction-free. 🏢 Real estate is the world’s largest asset class, yet the legal processes and tools behind it remain slow, manual, and underinvested. Lawyers must review dense documents line by line and piece together information across silos, all while clients demand faster, more transparent due diligence. 🤖 That's where we come in. Orbital Copilot is the AI assistant built exclusively for commercial real estate law. Developed with former practicing real estate lawyers, it accelerates complex due diligence by up to 70% while delivering legal-grade precision. 💰 We’ve just raised a $60m Series B to accelerate our UK/US expansion. 🤝 We're trusted by leading firms like Goodwin and BCLP to remove the busywork so legal teams can focus on what they do best: applying sharp legal judgment, delivering standout client service, and getting deals over the line faster. 💡 Working at Orbital means joining a team that's reimagining how real estate transactions get done - moving fast, working collaboratively, and giving people the ownership to make a real impact from day one. ROLE OVERVIEW - We're looking for a Senior Data Engineer with Analytics experience (Contract) to design and build the analytics foundations for a new greenfield product. There is no existing infrastructure: no pipelines, no operational data store, no semantic layer. You are starting from zero and leaving behind something clean, well-documented, and extendable. - The core challenge is architectural: taking a live Postgres product database as the source of truth, understanding how to extract from it reliably as its schema evolves, standing up well-structured operational data stores, and making sound decisions about where data lives, how it flows, and how it is queried. The analytics and visualisation layer, internal dashboards for engineering, product, and CS teams, plus customer-facing usage reporting for law firm clients, sits on top of those foundations and is equally in scope. - This is a Senior role because you are leading this build independently. Ciaran (Head of Product Engineering) is your day-to-day contact and sounding board, but he is not a data engineer and will not be directing the technical work. The architecture, the tooling decisions, and the quality of what gets built are yours to own. - This is an AI-first environment. We use Claude Code and coding agents extensively. Good documentation here means documentation written for a coding agent: how to access systems, how to extend pipelines, why decisions were made. That is the handover standard. WHAT THIS ROLE IS NOT - We are not looking for someone who will build an overblown lakehouse . - We are not looking for a pure analytics or BI engineer who is great at SQL and dashboards but cannot stand up cloud infrastructure independently. - And we are not looking for someone who needs a surrounding data team or close technical direction to operate. - The right person is a senior builder: self-sufficient, architecturally minded, and pragmatic enough to build something clean that a coding agent can extend after they leave. WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING - Assess the Postgres product database and design an analytics architecture appropriate for our current scale: operational data stores, extraction strategy, schema isolation, and semantic layer, without over-engineering - Build reliable extraction pipelines from Postgres and other operational sources that are resilient to schema drift and isolated from the application layer - Design and implement a well-structured operational data store: clean schemas, stable marts, and a semantic layer that teams across the business can query and trust - Define canonical business metrics: product usage, customer health, LLM token and cost telemetry, document volume, workflow adoption, latency, and engineering KPIs, and make them consistently available across the business - Stand up internal analytics for engineer...