Staff Engineer (Data)

Location: Remote

At Arbor, we’re on a mission to transform the way schools work for the better. 
We believe in a future of work in schools where being challenged doesn’t mean being burnt out and overworked. Where data guides progress without overwhelming staff. And where everyone working in a school is reminded why they got into education every day. 
Our MIS and school management tools are already making a difference in over 12,000 schools and trusts. Giving time and power back to staff, turning data into clear, actionable insights, and supporting happier working days. 
At the heart of our brand is a recognition that the challenges schools face today aren’t just about efficiency, outputs and productivity - but about creating happier working lives for the people who drive education everyday: the staff. We want to make schools more joyful places to work, as well as learn. 

Arbor has a large product suite serving thousands of schools, a data platform sitting underneath them all, and a growing set of AI/agentic features that depend on all this being right. We need a Staff Engineer to lead and drive the technical direction across all three. 

You'll own architecture for the Data domain, spanning OLAP, OLTP and the foundations our AI products run on. You'll set direction for teams you don't manage whilst supporting R&D’s rapid evolution to AI-native. Expect to spend as much time getting Leads and Product Directors bought into an approach as you spend designing it.

You're the right fit if you:

• Have set architectural direction across 3 or more teams, not one or two
• Can demonstrate excellent commercial and customer understanding alongside strong technical foundations
• Have real depth in more than one data discipline (platform, analytics, science or AI) and are honest about the ones you don't
• Have worked in product-led scale ups or been through major transformations, where success takes tenacity and high energy

This isn't for you if you:

• Want a role shipping code. The job is technical strategic direction and coaching
• Have spent your career in a single data discipline or one layer of the stack
• Design, document and hand over. You own whether we deliver, not the diagram
• Only enjoy the technical side of the role. You'll be in the room with product and commercial constantly

Core responsibilities

• Define and evangelise target architectures that bridge our transactional, analytical, and AI systems, ensuring our data remains a competitive advantage.
• Be a leader for our end-to-end data lifecycle, from OLTP schema design and migrations to OLAP governance, platform and analytics.
• Partner with Technical Leads to provide hands-on guidance supporting feature delivery, tech debt paydown, and architecture improvements. (Hands-on for this role means staying close to the details but not necessarily coding)
• Collaborate with Product Directors to understand product vision and translate this into deliverables, aligning commercial and engineering goals.
• Lead our shift to an AI-First way of working, architecting the data foundations to enable AI in our products and championing the latest approaches to help drive productivity gains
• Architect the future infrastructure required for LLM orchestration, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and real-time model inference at scale
• Mentor and coach Technical Leads/Senior Engineers on architectural and engineering excellence, continually raising our bar and supporting career growth
• Act as a role model for technical leadership — work with pace, be pragmatic, and stay laser focused on outcomes not output
• Head up architectural reviews for your domain and ensure all designs meet Arbor’s quality, reliability, security and compliance standards.
• Collaborate with Staff Engineers and Principal Engineers to shape Arbor’s broader technology strategy, working outside your domain as needed
• Partner with Engineering Management to help grow teams, identify and resolve systemic bottlenecks, ensuring the success of our strategic goals

• Extensive experience overseeing data architecture and a track record of delivering iterative outcomes across one or more OLAP domains
• Strong understanding of data modelling techniques (Star, Medallion, etc) and distributed data systems within cloud-native environments (Snowflake, etc).
• Experience in building and leveraging unstructured data across disparate systems to enable product development.
• Examples of communication and influencing across technical and non-technical audiences to achieve positive outcomes.
• An ability to support the growth of engineers and technical leads whilst still delivering value across distributed, cross-functional teams.
• Demonstrable experience working in an ownership culture where quality, performance, observability, and security are core responsibilities for every engineer
• An understanding and opinion on how AI-first engineering will change the data ecosystem and ways of working, ideally with worked examples
• Examples of contributing to or leading technical communities of practice (e.g. chapters, guilds, architecture councils).
• Practical knowledge of DataOps principles, including CI/CD for data and the orchestration of complex pipelines (e.g., AWS, Debezium, Git, Infra as Code).
• Good commercial knowledge of data security standards, encryption at rest/transit, and relevant compliance laws.
• Platform financial acumen - demonstrable experience of optimising SaaS platform spend, and the use of forecasting models.

Bonus Skills

• AI/ML Engineering & MLOps, including model deployment/serving and monitoring.
• Experience with federated learning and/or privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs).
• Direct experience with LLM Ops, including prompt engineering at scale, and token cost optimisation.

The chance to work alongside a team of hard-working, passionate people in a role where you’ll see the impact of your work everyday. We also offer:

• A dedicated wellbeing team who champion initiatives such as mindfulness, lunch n learns, manager training, mental health first aid training and much more!
• 32 days holiday (plus Bank Holidays). This is made up of 25 days annual leave plus 7 extra company wide days given over Easter, Summer & Christmas
• Life Assurance paid out at 3x annual salary
• Comprehensive wellness benefit provided by AIG Smart Health, which provides a 24/7 virtual GP service, Mental health support, Counselling, and personalised Health Checks 
• Private Dental Insurance with Bupa 
• Salary sacrifice Pension provided by Scottish Widows
• Enhanced maternity and adoption leave (20 weeks full pay) and paternity (6 weeks full pay) pay
• 5 free return to work maternity coaching sessions, helping you adapt to this new exciting time of life!
• Access to services such as Calm and Bippit (financial wellbeing coaching) 
• All of our roles champion flexible working and we are happy to discuss what this means to you
• Social committees that plan team, office and company wide events to bring people together and celebrate success
• Dedicated professional development training budget (CPD courses, upskilling resources, professional memberships etc)
• Volunteer with a charity of your choice for a day each year
• Dog friendly offices!

1. Phone screen
2. 1st stage
3. 2nd stage

We are committed to a fair and comfortable recruitment process, so if you require any reasonable adjustments during your application or interview process, please reach out to a member of the team at [email protected].

Our commitment is also backed by our partnership with Neurodiversity Consultancy, Lexxic who provide us with training, support and advice. 

Our goal is for Arbor to be a workplace which represents, celebrates and supports people from all backgrounds, and which gives them the tools they need to thrive - whatever their ambitions may be so we support and promote diversity and equality, and actively  encourage applications from people of all backgrounds. 

Know someone else who would be good for this role? You can refer a friend, family member or colleague, if they are offered a role with Arbor, we will say thank you with a voucher valued up to £200! Simply email: [email protected] 

Please note: We are unable to provide visa sponsorship at this time.