Graduate Data Engineer

Build Something That Matters

Native has been building for 10 years, but we're still very much a startup: fast-moving, ambitious, and building with intent. We're creating the infrastructure that connects students, Students' Unions, universities, and advertisers through a managed marketplace.

Our goal is to increase student engagement while enabling Students' Unions to secure sustainable funding. For advertisers, we offer meaningful, measurable routes to student audiences. The more aligned these incentives are, the more defensible and scalable our business becomes.

We’re looking for graduates who want to step straight into meaningful work, learn quickly, and grow fast.

What We’re Looking for

We value clarity of thought, good judgement under pressure, and the ability to create structure where none exists.

You Might Be Right for This If

• You think in first principles, not borrowed answers – solving problems from the ground up
• You thrive in ambiguity – you’re comfortable making decisions when there isn’t a map
• You do the work – not for applause, but because it matters to you that things are done well
• You’ve got range – you’re not just smart on paper; you’ve done things that demanded resilience, judgement, or initiative

We are open to a wide range of degree backgrounds, but we look for intellectual sharpness and structured thinking. That often shows up in disciplines like engineering, maths, philosophy, languages (whether classical or modern), or history - but not always. If your academic path is less typical, help us understand how your thinking has been shaped and why it stands up.

What You’ll Be Working On

You’ll Be Directly Involved In

• Building and maintaining reliable data pipelines, ensuring accurate aggregation of behavioural event data and survey responses
• Implementing identity stitching processes to reliably connect diverse datasets and manage consistent student identifiers across multiple sources
• Ensuring robust pseudonymisation and data minimisation practices are consistently applied, maintaining privacy and GDPR compliance
• Identifying and implementing practical enhancements to existing infrastructure, improving pipeline scalability, reliability, and efficiency
• Collaborating closely with the Student Personas team, contributing directly to data quality, documentation clarity, and overall process improvement

This role is hands-on and highly technical, designed to rapidly build your practical skills and technical expertise in data engineering within a live production environment.

Required Skills

• You’ve excelled academically - whether that's first-class honours, Dean’s List, academic awards, or equally impressive independent projects, research, or hackathon results. What matters is intellectual clarity and rigour
• You’re already confident writing SQL, and you know how to build queries that are clear, efficient, and robust - whether learned from coursework, internships, or self-initiated projects
• You’ve got practical Python skills - maybe from significant coursework, personal projects, or internships - and you're comfortable exploring data using libraries like pandas or numpy
• You’ve had hands-on experience with structured or semi-structured data, including tasks like designing schemas, cleaning messy datasets, or validating results - perhaps through coursework, Kaggle competitions, or personal data projects
• You’ve shown initiative in teaching yourself new technical tools or concepts beyond what was required - such as exploring BigQuery, dbt, Airflow, Docker, or other data engineering technologies on your own time

Progression

This is an initial six-month engagement. If you perform well, the expectation is that you’ll move into a promoted, permanent role at the end of that period. We treat this as a proving ground for long-term hires, not an internship.

During your interview process, you'll be encouraged to speak with previous graduate hires at native who joined through this route, so you can hear directly how this role can set you up for rapid career progression.

Location and Ways of Working

You’ll be based in our London office, working in person at least four days a week, with one optional day remote. We believe in high-bandwidth collaboration and fast decision-making, so most of the work happens face-to-face.

How to Apply

We Don’t Want a Cover Letter. Instead, answer a Few Questions We Have Which Will Help Us Understand How You Think

• A trade-off you’ve had to make and how you decided
• A problem you tackled without much guidance
• A system or process you’d redesign and how you’d go about it
• A time you had to choose what not to do, and why

Also please do include a recent CV, or a link to your LinkedIn profile / equivalent.

And if you’re reading this and thinking, I really want to do this, but I probably won’t get picked - apply anyway. We care far more about how you think and how you show up than whether you tick every imagined box. Don’t rule yourself out.

We’re hiring on a rolling basis. If this sounds like the kind of challenge you’re ready for, get in touch.

Equal Opportunity Statement

We are actively creating an equitable environment for everyone at native to thrive.

Diversity and inclusion are a priority for us, and we are making sure we have lots of support for all of our people to grow at native. At native, we embrace diversity in all of its forms and foster an inclusive environment for all people to do the best work of their lives with us.

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