Lead Data Engineer

Apron was started by a group of people who’d spent years building products for some of today’s most successful global fintech companies. But there was one problem that no-one was solving: Business money.

One million small businesses in the UK will each spend 5 hours this week paying and reconciling invoices, alongside countless hours chasing staff for expense receipts.

That’s why we created Apron as an essential tech layer in the small business machine. We flip the payment experience from blocking business to boosting it. Apron weaves neatly into your workflow and tightens it up, turning hours into minutes.

We have grown fast over the past few years, expanding our team to circa 100 individuals across the UK and more. We are backed by Index Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation of Visionaries Club and the founders of Melio and Klarna and we’ve raised $50m.

At Apron, many of our teams rely on data - from Payments, Cards, and Invoice Capture to Customer Support. We’re also actively developing AI technologies, such as document recognition and invoice detection, that depend on a strong data foundation.

We already have talented data analysts, and many others across the company (product managers, engineers, support) who work with data every day. Our goal is to empower everyone at Apron to explore, understand, and act on data in a self-serve way.

So far, we’ve built the first version of our data platform usingdbt and Metabase. Now we’re taking it to the next level: evolving the architecture to handle more data sources, greater scale, and new use cases from analytics to AI. This includes building a warehouse setup that can grow with us, consolidating company-wide data, and giving every team the tools to use it effectively.

We’re looking for a Lead Data Engineer who can own and lead this evolution of our data platform: making it reliable, scalable, secure, and ready for the next stage of Apron’s growth.
This is a hands-on IC role, focused on:

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• Build & run our data platform so it’s fast, reliable, and always ahead of the curve.

  
  

• Make data self-serve for the whole team — ensuring everything lands in our DWH with the right discovery & cataloging tools in place.

  
  

• Set the rules of the road for data governance, privacy, and compliance (GDPR and beyond).

  
  

• Keep our data safe by implementing and monitoring security controls.

  
  

• Get your hands dirty — this is a hands-on IC role where you’ll own the development and support of the platform.

  
  

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• 5+ years across Data Engineering with Startup/tech company background.

  
  

• SQL & Python: schema design, transformations, query optimisation, automation, testing.

  
  

• Experience designing and building data architecture (including warehouse setup) from scratch.

  
  

• Track record of building ETL/ELT pipelines into modern warehouses (BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift).

  
  

• Familiar with tools like Dagster, Airflow, Prefect, dbt, Dataform, SQLMesh.

  
  

• Cloud experience (we’re on GCP) + containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes).

  
  

• Strong sense of ownership over data standards, security, and roadmap.

  
  

• A collaborator at heart — working with analysts, engineers, and product teams to turn data into business impact.

  
  

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• Highly competitive salary

  
  

• Stock options

  
  

• Health insurance with AXA (including Optical and Dental cover)

  
  

• Life Assurance with MetLife

  
  

• Enhanced parental leave

  
  

• Weekly Deliveroo allowance

  
  

• Salary sacrifice schemes (Nursery, Cycle to Work, Electric vehicle)

  
  

• Fully expensed tech

  
  

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