Backend and Data Systems Engineer

About Vepler

Vepler is an AI-native property intelligence company. We combine research and technology to help organisations understand the built environment and make informed decisions.

The opportunity

Vepler's platform is built from public records about the UK built environment: planning, environmental risk, land, energy, addressing and more. Those records are fragmented, contradictory and constantly changing. The systems that bring them in at national scale, resolve them to the right entities and keep the result current are what the company runs on. This role owns a core part of them.

You would join a small engineering team, working directly with the founders. You make the architecture calls in your domain, deploy your own work, and decide what the platform does next there. As the team grows, you shape how it works.

We use AI throughout: an inference fleet we run ourselves, agentic pipelines that keep national coverage growing, and an evaluation discipline that measures everything before it ships. You would build that infrastructure.

What you will do

• Own the ingestion systems that keep the platform current across its national sources: reliability, throughput, recovery and the tooling around them
• Own the entity resolution that ties each incoming record to the right address, site or property, and raise coverage across the estate
• Build geospatial datasets from source acquisition through to a versioned product customers query, with PostGIS and the pipeline tooling around it
• Make the architecture decisions in your domain and see them through to production
• Set the standard for how systems are tested, measured and operated, and document it for the engineers who follow

What we are looking for

• Node.js and TypeScript in production, with real systems behind you
• SQL well past the ORM: query plans, indexes, and what a write costs at scale
• Data pipelines built for change: retries, idempotency, deduplication, backfills and change detection
• Practical geospatial work with PostGIS or similar: spatial queries, coordinate systems, geometry validation
• Diagnosing production problems on your own and fixing them properly
• Clear written English, particularly about failure and uncertainty. Most of how we work is written
• Fluency with current AI tooling, and the judgement to check its output. Python is useful. We will teach you the rest of our stack

What you get

• A rate set against the senior market, reviewed at a fixed point, and a completion payment on accepted delivery and handover
• Remote-first, flexible hours, and an agreed overlap with the UK team
• Direct access to the founders and authority over the decisions in your domain
• The tools we use ourselves: current frontier models, our own inference fleet, and the budget to run what the work needs

Where this goes

The role starts as an initial engagement with a review at a fixed point. If both sides want to continue, it becomes a long-term position through local employment: private health insurance from day one, 25 days of leave plus public holidays, a learning budget, equipment and coworking, and a stake in the company, with terms set out before you accept.

By six months you would own an end-to-end domain and take part in hiring. By twelve to twenty-four months you would be a core technical owner of the platform, on either a senior technical track or a technical leadership track as the team grows.

How we work

• Remote-first, with an agreed overlap window rather than fixed hours
• Evidence over opinion: everything ships measured
• Written by default: decisions, trade-offs and post-mortems live in documents
• Small and direct: engineering talks to the decision-maker

How we hire

Four stages inside two weeks, a decision within 48 hours of the last one, and no unpaid work.

• A short written exchange by email: three questions on real problems from our estate
• Introductory conversation (45 minutes): your background, ambitions and the work
• Working session, paid at a day rate: a real problem on sanitised data, in your own time, with whatever tooling you normally use
• Walkthrough (45 minutes): we change the requirement and work on your solution together