Staff Data Platform Engineer

We’re looking for a Staff Data Platform Engineer to join our Data team at Yoto, to help power insights and decision-making across the business. You'll set technical direction, raise the engineering bar across the data team, and shape how our data platform scales as Yoto grows.

About Yoto

Yoto is a screen-free interactive audio platform for kids. We make carefully connected audio players that kids control, with no microphones, cameras or ads. We have a catalogue of audio that inspires creative play and learning with 1,000+ titles in our card store from top creators, publishers and labels - think Disney, Marvel, Roald Dahl and Universal Music. We also create Yoto Originals like BrainBots.

• Voted the 14th fastest-growing private software technology company in Britain in The Sunday Times 100 Tech 2025; and named the 94th fastest-growing company in Europe in the prestigious FT1000.

• Ranked 9th in Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in 2024; and featured in the Sifted 100 fastest-growing startups across the UK&I by revenue growth.

• Featured in Bloomberg’s 25 UK startups to watch in 2023; and ranked second fastest growing tech company in the UK in the Deloitte Fast50.

• Named one of TIME Magazine’s Top 100 Inventions of 2020.

• We’re over 200 employees spread across the world.. and growing!

We’re on a mission to be the soundtrack of childhood, and help families on their own unique adventures. By creating products that inspire independent play, we help families discover and grow with an inspiring world of audio - and we would like you to help us achieve it! 

Yoto’s Data Team

We’re a growing team at the heart of all the decisions Yoto makes. We tackle a broad range of problems, from developing cutting edge data solutions to building and maintaining data pipelines, query and orchestration platforms, our work spans across all the key strategic projects throughout the company. We supercharge growth by providing self-service tools, valuable insights and advanced data science solutions. We work in a high-trust environment with a lot of independence. Everyone can contribute ideas and be part of the decision making process.

What you’ll be doing:

• Own the architecture, reliability and long-term health of Yoto's end-to-end data platform, spanning GKE-hosted infrastructure, data ingestion, orchestration and transformation

• Define and maintain the data platform roadmap, translating company strategy into a sequenced set of technical investments with clear short- and long-term trade-offs documented

• Work across data science, analytics, product and software engineering to convert business requirements into platform capabilities, and ensure the platform serves company-wide use cases

• Set and enforce standards for data governance, access controls, data quality and ownership across the platform

• Manage and develop a mid-level data engineer directly, including regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and structured growth plans, while also raising technical capability across the wider data team through code review, documentation and pairing.

What you’ll bring:

• Extensive hands-on experience in data engineering or analytics engineering, with a demonstrable track record of owning platform-level systems end-to-end, not just individual pipelines

• Experience designing and operating production data platforms across cloud infrastructure, orchestration, ingestion and SQL transformation layers

• Practical experience with GCP, BigQuery, Terraform, Kubernetes, Dagster, dlt and dbt - or equivalent tools with the ability to articulate transferable reasoning

• Demonstrated ability to make and document architecture decisions that involve meaningful trade-offs across multiple teams or domains

• A track record of authoring and landing technical standards across Python, SQL and infrastructure code that