About the Job:
A live-service video game runs on data. Every combat encounter, crafting attempt, trade, and login generates events that the studio needs to design better systems, balance the economy, and keep the world healthy. We need a Senior Data Engineer who can build the data platform that turns millions of player events into something designers, producers, and leadership can actually use.
You will report into the technology team and work closely with backend engineering, game design, production, and our analysts. You will own the telemetry pipeline end to end: event collection from the game client and servers, ingestion and processing, warehousing, and the modelled datasets that analytics and dashboards are built on.
We are in early production. The event taxonomy, ingestion architecture, warehouse, and data quality standards are being established from the ground up. You will be making foundational decisions about how this studio captures and uses data for years of live service to come. HANDS ON EXPERIENCE WORKING FOR OTHER VIDEO GAME STUDIOS IS STRONGLY PREFERRED.
Your RoleData Platform and Pipelines
Design and build the telemetry ingestion pipeline: event collection from Unreal Engine clients and dedicated servers, streaming and batch processing, and reliable delivery into the warehouse.
Own the data warehouse: schema design, modelled datasets, partitioning, and performance. Choose and operate the right stack (BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, or equivalent) for a studio of our size and roadmap.
Build transformation layers (dbt or equivalent) that turn raw events into clean, documented, analyst-ready models for player behaviour, economy, progression, and engagement.
Implement orchestration (Airflow or equivalent) with monitoring, alerting, and recovery so that pipelines fail loudly and recover cleanly.
Design the data architecture for MMO scale: high event volumes from a persistent world, evolving schemas across game updates, and retention policies that respect both cost and analytical need.
Event Taxonomy and Data Quality
Define the studio's event taxonomy with game design and backend engineering: what gets tracked, how events are named and versioned, and what context each event carries.
Own data quality: validation at ingestion, anomaly detection, schema-change management, and the discipline that keeps designers trusting the numbers.
Implement privacy-compliant data handling: GDPR-aware collection, player data deletion, anonymisation, and regional considerations for a UK and EU player base.
Document the platform so analysts and engineers can self-serve: dataset catalogues, event dictionaries, and pipeline runbooks.
Collaboration and Enablement
Work with game design to instrument the systems that matter: combat, progression, economy, crafting, and social features, so playtests and live data answer real design questions.
Support our analysts with reliable datasets, query performance, and tooling. Their dashboards are only as good as the platform underneath.
Collaborate with backend engineering on event emission from game services, and with DevOps on infrastructure, cost, and deployment of the data stack.
Contribute to architecture documentation and technical reviews across the engineering team.
Must-Haves
6+ years of experience in data engineering, with production ownership of pipelines and warehouses that other teams depended on.
2+ years of experience building data systems for other video game studios.
Strong SQL and strong Python, with production experience building and operating ETL/ELT pipelines.
Experience with a modern cloud warehouse (BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, or equivalent) and transformation tooling such as dbt.
Experience with both streaming and batch ingestion patterns, and with orchestration tools such as Airflow.
Experience designing event taxonomies or tracking schemas for a product, ideally at high event volume.
Strong communication skills. You can explain a data model to a game designer and a cost trade-off to a producer.
Nice-to-Haves
Experience in games: player telemetry, game analytics pipelines, or live-service data platforms.
Experience shipping or operating an MMO, free-to-play, or live-service title with its economy and engagement data.
Familiarity with Unreal Engine telemetry integration or game server event emission.
Experience with real-time analytics or in-game data products such as live dashboards and experiment frameworks.
Experience with infrastructure-as-code and cost governance for data workloads.
About You
You build platforms other people depend on, and you take that responsibility seriously.
You care about data quality the way an engineer cares about tests. A dashboard built on bad data is worse than no dashboard.
You are comfortable working through ambiguity. Early production means defining the approach, not executing against an established one.
You balance ideal architecture with studio reality. You build for what the game needs next year without gold-plating what it needs this month.
You work autonomously in a remote environment, proactively keeping your collaborators informed.
Location: Remote-first
Type: Full-time
Start: ASAP
Salary: Competitive, based on experience
Job Types: Full-time, Fixed term contract, Temp to perm
Pay: £65,000.00-£80,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Company events
- UK visa sponsorship
- Work from home
Experience:
- data engineering: 5 years (required)
- video game industry: 2 years (required)
Work Location: Remote
