Senior Data Operations Engineer

About Pirical

Pirical pioneers the field of People Analytics within the legal industry. Our mission is to help law firms make better, faster and more informed decisions by turning complex people data into actionable insights.

Today, many of the world's leading law firms use Pirical, including all five Magic Circle firms. We are an organically grown business of nearly 50 exceptionally talented team members and have built two market-leading SaaS products over the last decade.

We've grown year on year without external funding, established ourselves as the leader in legal People
Analytics in the UK, and are now expanding our products and team internationally.

Why join Pirical?

We asked our team what defines Pirical's culture. In their own words:
“You’re not just a number. You have a voice and can make an impact. It’s extremely rare if you have a good idea here that it won’t be given due diligence. The company will support you to bring them to fruition with a good level of guidance and support.” - Analyst
“The team is talented, hard-working and supportive.” - Sales Rep
“HUGE amounts of autonomy and flexibility in a less structured environment than a big company.” - Customer Success Rep
“The company values logic and continuous improvement. Problem-solving from first principles is normal and encouraged.” - Data Engineer
“Ample L&D opportunities. It’s a place where the brighter you want to shine, the company is likely to help facilitate that.” - Software Engineer

The role...

We're looking for a Senior Data Operations Engineer to help transform how Pirical's data operations work.

Today, many of the processes that keep our data products running are manual or semi-automated. They work, but we know there's a better way. Your job is to find it.

You'll get hands-on with our existing data operations, understand how and why they work, identify where time is being lost and progressively turn manual processes into reliable, observable and automated systems.

This isn't a role where you'll simply inherit established pipelines and maintain them. We're looking for someone who enjoys looking at a repetitive process and thinking, "there has to be a better way to do this."

Initially, you'll spend significant time understanding and running our existing operations. Over time, success means progressively engineering away that manual workload and creating systems that
require less human intervention.

Role Responsibilities...

• Run and maintain Pirical's existing data operations and processing workflows
• Identify opportunities to make existing processes faster, cheaper and more reliable
• Automate manual and semi-manual data processing pipelines using Python, SQL and appropriate tooling
• Build monitoring, alerting and data quality checks to maintain the integrity of Pirical's data
• Investigate and resolve operational data issues when processes fail or produce unexpected results
• Design automation that is maintainable, observable and usable by the wider team
• Use AI tooling to improve the speed and quality of operational engineering work
• Review technical work and help guide more junior members of the team
• Work across both day-to-day KTLO operations and longer-term automation and improvement projects

Role Requirements

• Strong Python and SQL skills
• Experience building, maintaining or improving data processing pipelines
• Personally taken manual or semi-manual processes through to automation
• Understand how to build automation that is reliable, maintainable and observable
• Able to investigate data and system failures independently and logically identify root causes
• Comfortable working with existing systems that aren't perfectly engineered or documented
• Able to communicate technical ideas clearly and guide less experienced team members
• Curious about AI tooling and interested in how tools such as Claude Code can improve the way you work
• Experience with AWS, Data Operations, operational engineering or modernising legacy data processes would be beneficial, but isn't essential.

Why might this role be interesting?

• Ownership. You'll have the freedom to identify problems and decide how best to solve them.
• Visible impact. You'll directly see manual workload disappear as the systems you build improve.
• Interesting engineering problems. You'll solve real operational problems with real users, data and complexity.
• AI-positive environment. You'll have the freedom to experiment with how AI can improve the way we build and operate.
• Technical influence. You'll help raise engineering standards and develop the wider Data Operations team.
• Room to grow. As the function becomes increasingly automated and technically sophisticated, there is scope to take on greater technical leadership.

Pirical is committed to being an inclusive and diverse place to work. The excellent work produced at Pirical would not be possible without bringing together all of the different backgrounds, experiences and skills that our team has. We treat every employee equally and fairly regardless of age, disability, gender, marital status, race, religion or sexual orientation. It is vitally important that each of our team members feels confident, comfortable and empowered.

Note to recruitment agencies: Pirical is committed to building a long-term approach to our hiring strategy and is already working in partnership with selected talent partners. We therefore ask you to hold off sending speculative CVs or sales approaches.