Senior Data Engineer

Ship maintenance is broken. We're fixing it.

Ceto is a fleet intelligence company. Our platform, Watchkeeper, takes the high-frequency sensor data ships already generate and predicts machinery failures before they happen — on one vessel we flagged a developing fuel-system issue days before a critical failure, on a ship earning $48,000 a day. No new hardware, no rip-and-replace: if an owner is already capturing data, we can have a full fleet live in days. We're deployed across fleets owned by major global shipowners, and we sell directly to the ship owners and operators who feel every day of unplanned off-hire on their P&L.

We're a small, senior team - our CEO spent eight years at sea as a marine engineer before founding the company; we’re backed by investors including Dynamo Ventures who led our $4.8m seed round, and we're compounding fast which is exactly why we need you.

What we're doing

We're reshaping maritime. It's an industry that's incredibly important and serves as the backbone of global trade, moving $14 trillion of cargo each year. Despite its significance, the industry remains one of the final frontiers of digitalisation.

Ceto provides the operational intelligence layer that technical teams rely on for mission-critical decision making. By capturing and analysing high-frequency data from commercial ships, Ceto monitors the condition of the machinery onboard. Through anomaly detection and degradation forecasting we predict mechanical failures ahead of time and guide decision making for our customers. Our analytics are served as insights through our dashboard, preventing costly breakdowns, loss of hire events and reducing operational risk.

The role

We’re hiring for a data engineer who has experience building and maintaining production software across the full stack. This role requires you to wear many hats, operating across the full breadth of our production tech: APIs, ingestion pipelines, databases, infrastructure, architecture, orchestration, tooling and the occasional dash of front end. You will fundamentally own all the technology that supplies our predictive analytics with data and serve those analytics to the customer.

Your responsibilities will include

• Owning the data platform, from the database through to the vessel sensor assignment
• Designing and building systems and pipelines for transporting data efficiently
• Designing and implementing data structures / schemas that serve our product needs
• Building and maintaining APIs
• Maintaining and improving existing services and products such as our emissions engine
• Interfacing with our clients’ technical teams to understand their technical requirements
• Building and improving internal tools that improve developer experience
• Working closely with our data scientists to supply the data they require
• Working throughout the rest of our technical stack where required e.g. implementing a new feature in the platform front end

Two firm requirements

• You have experience in an early-stage startup and are comfortable working at speed, context switching and turning ambiguous problems into delivered solutions
• You’re AI-native, using the modern tools to increase your productivity and you have a good feel for when to trust agents and when to do the work by hand

You'll be perfect for this role if

• You have strong Python skills and know its data libraries (pandas/polars/numpy)
• You have experience dealing with large datasets (billions of data points) and maintaining databases to support this volume of data
• You enjoy learning new technologies and want to work across the full breadth of a platform
• You have built production APIs with modern frameworks (Flask/Fast/Express/H3) and understand best practices e.g. authentication + authorization
• You have experience with cloud platforms (Azure preferred, AWS, GCP) and have shipped production systems to the cloud
• You understand engineering best practices and have exposure to CI/CD + DevOps
• You have worked with containerised applications and Docker
• You are comfortable working in an ambiguous problem space and can weigh up the trade-offs quickly and effectively
• You are a good communicator and know what level of technicality to express depending on your audience e.g. speaking with a non-technical client

It's also a bonus if you have

• You have experience working in a polyglot codebase (Typescript preferred) and have worked in multiple languages
• You have exposure to distributed systems / microservices
• You have a mechanical engineering background and understand what you might expect from a given engine sensor
• You have worked with MongoDB or other NoSQL databases
• You have experience working directly with clients, reading between the lines to define a product/feature/fix that matches their needs

We're less interested in ticking off niche experience like maritime or MongoDB specifically, and far more interested in someone who has worked across different technical stacks and can pick up new ones quickly. A strong generalist who's genuinely curious about the wider engineering problem, will do better here than a narrow specialist.

What's on offer

• Competitive salary based on experience
• Equity options
• 25 days holiday plus public holidays
• Birthdays off
• Bupa medical insurance
• Medicash
• Cycle to work scheme
• Hybrid working from our London office (3 days in office)
• Budget and time allocation for conferences and professional development
• The opportunity to shape the future of maritime technology

The interview process

1. Intro call + past project review + take home task (video call)
2. Take home task review + Q&A (video call)
3. Final in person round (London)