Senior Data Engineer / DataOps

Who we are 

Tractable is an Artificial Intelligence company bringing the speed and insight of Applied AI to visual assessment. Trained on millions of data points, our AI-powered solutions connect everyone involved in insurance, repairs, and sales of homes and cars – helping people work faster and smarter, while reducing friction and waste.

Founded in 2014, Tractable is now the AI tool of choice for world-leading insurance and automotive companies. Our solutions unlock the potential of Applied AI to transform the whole recovery ecosystem, from assessing damage and accelerating claims and repairs to recycling parts. They help make response to recovery up to ten times faster – even after full-scale disasters like floods and hurricanes. 

Tractable has a world-class culture, backed up by our team, making us a global employer of choice!

We’re a diverse team, uniting individuals of over 40 different nationalities and from varied backgrounds, with machine learning researchers and motor engineers collaborating together on a daily basis. We empower each team member to have tangible impact and grow their own scope by intentionally building a culture centred around collaboration, transparency, autonomy and continuous learning.

About Tractable

Tractable is an Artificial Intelligence company bringing the speed and insight of Applied AI to visual assessment. Trained on millions of data points, our AI-powered solutions connect everyone involved in insurance, repairs, and sales of homes and cars – helping people work faster and smarter, while reducing friction and waste.

Founded in 2014, Tractable is now the AI tool of choice for world-leading insurance and automotive companies. Our solutions unlock the potential of Applied AI to transform the whole recovery ecosystem, from assessing damage and accelerating claims and repairs to recycling parts. They help make response to recovery up to ten times faster – even after full-scale disasters like floods and hurricanes. 

We’re a diverse team, uniting individuals of over 40 different nationalities and from varied backgrounds, with machine learning researchers and motor engineers collaborating together on a daily basis. We empower each team member to have tangible impact and grow their own scope by intentionally building a culture centred around collaboration, transparency, autonomy and continuous learning.

What you will do

The Data & ML Ops team belongs to a larger group – Dev Foundations, which is focused on building tools and services for our internal customers within Tractable: researchers, product engineers, ops specialists, etc. We have 4 teams in Dev Foundations tackling different aspects of the space: Infrastructure & Security, Analytics, QA and Data & ML Ops. As a Senior Data Ops Engineer in the Data & ML Ops team, you will be collaborating with peer teams in Dev Foundations to provide a solid technical foundation, with product engineering teams building our asset appraisal platform and with researchers creating & iterating on the models which underpin our products.

We are looking for a Senior DataOps Engineer to build and support systems that enable the core mission of Tractable – to make applied AI possible – by optimising the end-to-end Machine Learning life cycle. The vision of the Data & ML Ops team is to enable researchers to spend 80%+ of their time solving tricky ML problems rather than dealing with engineering/infra/ops challenges. 

You will help mature our ML and Data platform to a world-class state. You will influence the scope and technical direction as well as champion best practices within the team. You have a relentless focus on user experience (researchers, data scientists and product engineers) and you care deeply about what your team is building to make sure it will have the biggest impact on your users. You will be a strong mentor, nurturing and encouraging the supportive environment to enable the team to do their best work.

The role: 

You’ll play a key role in developing our ML & Data platform from ground up, as part of a small, high-performing team. You will influence the scope and technical direction as well as champion best practices within the team. You will continuously pursue clean code practices and contribute towards overall platform architecture, collaborating with our other Engineering and Product teams.

You will:

• Work with engineers, researchers and data scientists to build the next generation of Tractable’s ML & Data platform
• Help identify and realise capabilities in our ML & Data platform that massively speed up getting research to production across dataset & model management, model training, model serving, labelling, Data & ML pipeline orchestration and more
• Support Research and Product Engineers with tools and processes to enable a seamless data flywheel
• Deploy and continuously develop robust infrastructure, using best practices for managing infrastructure-as-code
• Solve cost and performance scalability challenges in both model training and model serving
• Run, monitor and maintain business-critical, production systems
• Adopt open-source technologies to best leverage our in-house resources
• Promote engineering best practices throughout the team
• Suggest, collect and synthesise requirements to create an effective feature roadmap

Tech Stack:

We rely heavily on the following tools and technologies, but we are likely to explore new technologies / frameworks as we are building the platform from ground up. You don’t need to have prior experience in all of them, and we actively encourage diverse views on what the best tools for the job are. We’re just keen to know that you’re willing to break things, fix things, learn fast and help build a great team that is capable of building a platform that delights our customers.

• Main Infrastructure: AWS (EC2, S3, MSK, Lambda, StepFunctions, Glue, IAM, Cognito, Systems Manager, CloudWatch, SQS, Route 53, Sagemaker), Apache Kafka (AWS MSK), Kubernetes, Datadog (Metrics, Logs, Synthetics), Pagerduty
• Main CI/CD: Terraform, Docker, Harness
• Main Databases: Postgres / RDS, Redis, DynamoDB
• Main Languages: Python, Node + Typescript, SQL (Postgres)
• Main Data stack: AWS MSK, AWS Lambda, AWS Redshift, dbt, Airflow, Airbyte, AWS Glue
• Main ML stack:  Triton, TFServing, KServe, AWS Sagemaker, AWS Lambda, AWS MSK, sync/async APIs, Weights & Biases, Tensorflow, Pytorch, dvc, Dagster/Flyte, Streamlit

We encourage you to drop us a line even if you don’t have all the points above. That’s a lot of different areas of responsibility! We will help you pick them up because we believe that great people come from all walks of life.

What you need to be successful:

A strong Data Engineer, who is passionate about building platforms that massively reduce lead time from bringing Machine Learning research to production. You have a solid background in core software engineering principles, are happy deploying & managing infrastructure, and have a good understanding of the difficulties faced by data scientists. A few things we are particularly interested in seeing from you:

• Great communication skills and a collaborative mindset
• An ability to independently catalyse both process and technical change in a complex, highly cross-functional environment
• 2+ years of experience building and/or managing scalable data infrastructure (data ingestion, data lake, data warehouse, data orchestration), ideally on behalf of other users within an organisation
• Worked with Python in a professional environment for 2+ years
• Experience in building robust data pipelines
• Experience deploying and managing infrastructure-as-code, preferably via Terraform or AWS CDK
• Able to design scalable, robust, fault-tolerant, cost-effective system architectures and compare trade-offs (distributed systems experience a plus)
• Experience building robust, intuitive tooling to support internal users (e.g. common libraries, CLIs etc.)
• Cares about team practices / pairing / advocate of CI/CD
• Understanding of core ML concepts, with experience in supporting data scientists and researchers across the full Model & Data lifecycle

What’s in it for you

Generous financial reward for your effort

• Yearly compensation reviews
• Generous equity package
• 5% employer match on pension

Time off and flexible working

• 25 days paid annual leave + bank holidays
• Ability to work from abroad for up to 6 weeks/year
• Competitive maternity + paternity leave
• Flexible hours and hybrid working 
• Additional leave to support you when you need it, including sick pay, compassionate leave, or paid time-off to recharge after an intense work period

Support for your health and wellbeing

• Highest tier of private health coverage through Bupa 
• Eyewear and eyetests expense scheme
• Annual Headspace Subscription
• Mental health coaching with Sanctus

Additional perks 

• Workplace Nursery Benefit
• L&D budget to use on Learnerbly (our learning platform)
• WFH expense scheme
• Cycle to Work scheme
• Charity donation scheme with Tyve

Diversity commitment

At Tractable, we are committed to building a diverse team and inclusive workplace where people’s varied backgrounds and experiences are valued and recognised. 

We encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds and offer equal opportunities without discrimination.

#LI-HM1

Diversity commitment

At Tractable, we are committed to building a diverse team and inclusive workplace where people’s varied backgrounds and experiences are valued and recognised. 

We encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds and offer equal opportunities without discrimination.