Data platform Engineer (AI Platform)

Build and operate the foundation of a global AI-powered data platform

Location: UK (preferred), Netherlands or Belgium

Are you a Data Platform Engineer who thrives on building reliable, scalable platforms for data and AI workloads? Do you enjoy operating at the intersection of platform engineering, DataOps and MLOps while enabling AI systems to run securely and at scale?

We are looking for a Data Platform Engineer (AI & ML Infrastructure) to take ownership of the reliability, scalability and observability of our global data platform. In this role, you are responsible for the operational backbone of our Headless Data Architecture (HDA), ensuring that data and AI pipelines run seamlessly across regions and environments.

Your impact

As a Data Platform Engineer (AI & ML Infrastructure), you play a critical role in enabling our ambition to operate as an AI-powered Workforce-as-a-Service platform. You ensure that the underlying data and AI infrastructure is stable, scalable and ready to support advanced analytics and AI use cases across Europe, the UK, the US and APAC.

You own the day-to-day reliability of the platform — monitoring pipelines, resolving incidents and continuously improving performance and resilience. At the same time, you evolve the platform through automation, infrastructure-as-code and cost optimisation.

You work on a modern data and AI stack built on Databricks and Azure, managing everything from data ingestion pipelines and governance in Unity Catalog to platform-wide observability. You ensure that data flows from raw ingestion to AI-serving layers are robust, traceable and production-ready.

A key part of your role is enabling AI and ML workloads at scale. You support model evaluation frameworks, manage prompt lifecycle and implement guardrails that ensure AI systems are safe, reliable and compliant in production.

You collaborate closely with Data Engineers, AI/ML Engineers and governance stakeholders to ensure the platform is not only performant, but also future-proof, secure and scalable.

What you will do

• Operate and maintain the end-to-end data and AI platform on Databricks and Azure

• Monitor, troubleshoot and resolve production issues across data and ML pipelines

• Manage Unity Catalog governance, access control and data sharing structures

• Build and maintain ingestion and integration pipelines (e.g. via SnapLogic)

• Implement observability frameworks using tools such as OpenTelemetry and Grafana

• Automate infrastructure provisioning using Infrastructure-as-Code (e.g. Terraform)

• Optimise compute usage, scaling policies and overall platform cost efficiency

• Support AI/ML evaluation frameworks and model validation pipelines

• Manage prompt lifecycle, versioning and deployment across environments

• Implement AI guardrails, safety layers and monitoring for production systems

• Contribute to internal tooling and platform acceleration initiatives

• Collaborate across data, platform and AI teams to continuously improve the platform

About the role

You will be part of a growing Data & AI division that is central to the transformation of HeadFirst Group x Impellam into a truly data-driven organisation.

This role sits at the foundation of that ambition — ensuring that everything built on top of the platform, from analytics to AI products, is reliable, secure and scalable.

You work with modern technologies such as Databricks, Azure and advanced observability tooling, while contributing directly to the next generation of AI-enabled platform engineering.