About Hutora
Hutora is on a mission to reinvent how organisations manage, develop and deploy their workforce by rethinking workflows from the ground up for the AI age. Spun out of Learnerbly (a leading workplace learning platform), and currently in stealth, Hutora is a brand new AI-first product built on seven years of insight from working closely with HR and People leaders. We’re a well-connected, well-funded and ambitious startup that has done extensive customer research – we know the real problems to solve and how to solve them. Our team has a high engineering ratio, we move fast, value intense focus, and are passionate about delivering big results. Our first technical hires will work directly with our Head of Engineering, Head of Product, and CEO, to lay the foundation of a platform that will drive the future of work.
Why Join Hutora?
- High-impact, early team: Be one of our first engineers, a pivotal role where you’ll have outsized ownership and influence from day one. Your work will directly shape our product and our tech strategy.
- AI-forward & innovative: Join an AI-native team pushing the boundaries of how modern software is built. We use the latest AI tools to supercharge development and product capabilities, and you’ll be at the forefront of this revolution.
- Fast-faced startup environment: Experience the intensity and thrill of an early-stage startup that’s done its homework. We operate in a fast, high-pressure environment with high expectations. You’ll grow and learn extremely quickly by solving hard, real problems.
- Competitive compensation: We offer a competitive salary and meaningful equity. You’ll share in the success you help create.
What We’re Looking For
We’re looking for formidable engineers who act like owners. You should be able to take a vague problem, break it down, and ship a solution end-to-end without hand-holding. We love ‘expert generalists’, specific tech stack experience is less important to us than your ability to learn fast and adapt. We value fundamental engineering skills and the ability to collaborate with others to deliver value.
Here are some qualities that define our ideal teammates across all roles:
- Builder mentality: Proven track record of shipping software to production that solves real customer needs. You stop at nothing to accomplish the goal and can wear whatever hat necessary to get the job done.
- Startup grit: Comfortable working in ambiguity and rapidly changing environments. You’re pragmatic under pressure. When things inevitably go wrong (and they will), you stay calm, adapt, and keep moving forward.
- AI enthusiast: Hands-on experience building with AI/LLM technologies. You leverage AI tools daily to supercharge your work. You stay up-to-date on the latest AI releases, and have a critical sense for how AI can be used to create amazing customer experiences.
- Quality at speed: You write clean, reliable code but can also crank out a quick and dirty prototype when needed. You take pride in your craft but understand the need for balance, knowing when to incur tech debt and how to pay it down later. In short, you move fast without letting quality take a nose-dive.
- Growth mindset: You always believe you can learn and improve. You love learning new things, exploring new technologies, and continually improving your skills.
- Team player: Excellent communicator and collaborator. You can work closely with non-engineers (product, design, and customers) to figure out what needs to be built. You’re empathetic to end-users and your colleagues. You thrive when pairing on code and believe that knowledge-sharing makes the whole team better.
- Passion for early-stage: You love startups. Extreme ambiguity, big challenges, and hard work excite you. You take initiative, you handle responsibility, and you genuinely want to be part of building an awesome company from the ground up.
- Automation instinct: You spot repetitive toil early and squash it, wiring up CI, infrastructure-as-code, scripts, or AI agents at just the right moment to multiply your and the team’s output.
About The Role
As our first Data Engineer, you will design and own the data infrastructure that powers Hutora’s product. Our platform needs to integrate with a variety of client systems (HRIS, project management, productivity tools, etc.), and consolidate that data to drive insights and action. You will be responsible for building the pipelines to ingest data from these sources, transform and organise it in our data warehouse, and make it available to the application. This is a greenfield opportunity to set up a modern data stack from scratch. If you get excited by the idea of a well-designed data model and a smooth-running pipeline, and you also enjoy occasionally dabbling in application code to see your data come to life, this role will scratch that itch.
Key Responsibilities:
- Data pipeline development: Build robust pipelines to ingest data from various external tools and data stores used by our clients. You’ll ensure data flows reliably into our environment, handling issues like rate limits, errors, and data schema changes gracefully.
- Data warehouse and modeling: Define the schema and store all that raw data in our warehouse. Then transform it into clean, unified models that our product can use. You’ll likely use a tool like dbt to create reusable data models, applying business logic so that messy real-world data becomes a set of well-defined tables. Basically, you turn chaos into order in the data layer.
- Expose data to the product: Implement the mechanisms for our application and AI models to query this data efficiently. The goal is that our front-end and our AI can get the data needed quickly and securely, without reinventing the wheel. You’ll also think about caching, query performance, and scalability here.
- Data quality & security: Be the gatekeeper of data quality. Set up validations, monitoring, and alerting to ensure the data remains trustworthy. If a pipeline fails or data looks off, you catch it before it affects customers. You’ll also work with the rest of the team to handle sensitive data appropriately, considering encryption, access controls, GDPR, and compliance considerations. Trust is key: our clients need confidence that their data is safe in our hands.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Work closely with a Forward-Deployed Engineer to understand data needs for new features. If we’re implementing a new ML model that needs training data from a customer’s usage patterns, you’ll figure out how to pipe that in. If a customer wants to integrate a new data source, you’ll help assess and integrate it. You may occasionally join technical calls with customers’ IT teams to sort out integration details. In essence, you are the bridge between external data and our internal systems.
Ideal Profile:
- Experienced data wrangler: You have 4+ years in data engineering (or related fields like analytics engineering or backend with heavy data focus). You’re fluent in SQL and have built ETL/ELT pipelines that have handled substantial data. You know the pain of messy data and have used tools like Python, Airbyte/Fivetran, or Kafka, to move and transform data reliably.
- Modern data stack savvy: Experience with modern data warehouses (such as Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) and transformation tools (like dbt, or custom SQL/Python frameworks) will be very handy. You can design tables that make analytics a breeze and you understand the trade-offs of different data modeling approaches.
- Coding and scripting: While SQL is your bread and butter, you’re also comfortable writing code for data tasks. If a connector doesn’t exist, you can craft one. Bonus if you’ve dabbled in distributed data processing (Spark, Dask), but simplicity is fine too – we likely won’t be “big data” scale initially, just “medium data.”
- Detail-oriented & reliable: You take data integrity seriously. Terms like “idempotent, backfill, incrementality” are part of your vocabulary when discussing pipelines. You have the tools at your disposal to document and communicate the data model to downstream stakeholders. You test your pipelines and handle edge cases with care, including missing values, weird encodings, duplicate records. In short, you sweat the details.
- Product mindset for data: You’re not just moving data for data’s sake. You’re excited about how that data powers features and insights. You enjoy brainstorming with the product team about what’s possible if we combine data X and Y. You keep the end-user in mind: how will our AI use this data to solve a real problem? This viewpoint helps you prioritise what to integrate and how to shape it.
Why this role is exciting: You’ll have the rare opportunity to build a data foundation from the very start. No legacy, just a blank canvas and modern tools. You’re the kind of person who loves setting things up “the right way” and influencing best practices from day one. Plus, this role is deeply impactful: the data pipelines you build aren’t off in a silo, they are core to the product’s value proposition. You’ll see direct connections between your work and how our AI features and users perform. Lastly, as we’re an AI-first startup, you’ll get to work closely with AI technology and see how raw data turns into intelligent features, a great chance to expand your own skill set into AI if that interests you.
Location: This is a hybrid role with occasional travel to Edinburgh to collaborate in person with colleagues, and infrequent travel to London to get together as a company. Travel frequency will vary based on business needs – typically ranging from once per week to once per month.
Ready to build something amazing? If this role sounds like a fit for you, we’d love to hear from you! At Hutora, you’ll join a small, passionate team on the ground floor of an ambitious journey. It’s intense, challenging work, but also incredibly rewarding. You’ll create technology that changes how organisations operate. If you’re an expert generalist who wants to push the envelope with AI and make a real mark in an early-stage startup, get in touch.
