Senior Data Engineer

Senior IoT Data & AI Engineer

ABOUT AIREDALE

The Airedale Group are the leading market design, installation, and maintenance provider for commercial kitchens in the UK hospitality and food service industry. We work alongside clients from the initial designs through to bespoke fabrication and installation. Coupled with the largest body of professional maintenance engineers in the country, we offer the complete end-to-end solution to our extensive client base. We have long-standing relationships with many of the biggest multi-site brands in the UK.

ABOUT LIGHTHOUSE

Lighthouse is Airedale Group's IoT platform for commercial kitchens. We monitor and control the equipment inside them — fryers, grills, ovens, refrigeration, boilers — across the estates of some of the UK's best-known restaurant and pub brands. Unusually, we do not only observe that equipment; we control it, which is why major customers trust us with live cooking assets.

Energy savings opened the door, but they are not the product. The same data already evidences food safety compliance, stock loss prevention, cleaning compliance, remote fault diagnosis and — most significantly — early warning of equipment failure. Our predictive proof of concept identified drift several days before failures were logged, validated against real engineer job history rather than synthetic data.

Our board has funded a dedicated data and analytics capability to turn that evidence into product. This role builds it.

ABOUT THE ROLE

As Senior IoT Data & AI Engineer, you will convert proven analysis into running systems. Working alongside our IoT data analyst, who holds the domain knowledge and customer relationships, you will build the data platform, the predictive models and the automated reporting that allow insight to be produced repeatedly rather than by hand.

The first priority is early failure detection. We have committed to delivering it for a major customer, and getting it into service — then proving how accurate it is — is your first quarter.

This is a hands-on role in a deliberately small team. You will work directly with the CTO and with our IoT data analyst, who is your closest working partner: they define what good looks like and validate that what you build is right; you make it repeatable. You will also collaborate with the wider Airedale group data team on shared standards as that function develops.

You will not be required to run the monthly customer reporting meetings — the analyst leads those — but you should expect to join customers periodically and for technical discussions. Engineers who never meet the customer build the wrong thing.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Take our anomaly detection work from proof of concept into production across the estate, moving from retrospective analysis to live early warning.
• Build the validation loop that joins every alert to the engineer's finding, so detection accuracy is measured rather than asserted.
• Develop the failure-signature library from telemetry crossed with twenty years of service history — the asset that makes our predictions defensible and that no competitor can replicate.
• Tune alerting continuously so it stays actionable and does not become noise.
• Own the flow from ThingsBoard, currently on managed hosting, into Microsoft Fabric — streaming ingest, full-history archive, and the conformed layer beneath everything else.
• Build the derived data layer: asset state classification, expected consumption and baselines, deviation scoring, an event register and governed metric definitions.
• Evaluate ThingsBoard Trends Analytics against building our own and make the recommendation on evidence — then implement it.
• Apply proper engineering discipline: version control, testing, reproducibility. Nothing should depend on a script on someone's laptop.
• Build with large language models as a core part of the role, not an experiment: generated report narratives, plain-language explanation of anomalies, and a conversational interface over our data.
• Deliver that interface against the governed data layer, with customer isolation enforced properly and an evaluation suite that proves answers are correct.
• Maintain the boundary that matters: figures are computed in the data layer and narrated by the model, never generated by it.
• Industrialise the customer reporting our analyst currently produces by hand, so that it scales as the estate grows rather than consuming more people.
• Publish analytics outputs to our customer portal through served APIs.

EXPERIENCE REQUIRED

• Strong Python and SQL, with production experience building and operating data pipelines — ideally in Microsoft Fabric, or a comparable lakehouse platform such as Databricks, Synapse or a dbt-based stack.
• Hands-on experience with time-series, sensor or telemetry data at scale, including the realities of gaps, drift, flatlines and misbehaving devices.
• Applied anomaly detection or predictive modelling taken into production, with the judgement to keep methods robust and explainable rather than elaborate.
• Practical experience building with LLM APIs beyond chat use: retrieval, tool use, generated reporting, and evaluation of model outputs.
• Self-directed and adaptable, comfortable owning delivery end to end in a small team without an engineering department to fall back on.
• Able to explain technical work clearly to non-technical colleagues and customers.

WHY JOIN AIREDALE?

The Airedale Group is expanding rapidly, employing circa 700 people across multiple locations in the UK. This is a fantastic time to be joining the business with opportunities for career progression.

WHAT WE OFFER

• Competitive salary
• Bonus
• Permanent Contract
• 23 days + bank holidays, increasing to 26 with LOS
• Westfield Health insurance, Cash plan and Retail rewards
• Life Assurance x2
• Hybrid working with regular team meetings held in Brackley/Bradford