The posting
Time commitment: Full-time.
Location: Hybrid is preferred, working 2 days in the London office (Wednesdays and Thursdays) and 3 days at home per week.
Reporting to: VP of Technology, Avishai Gurt
About Paloma
Our mission is to make NHS autism and ADHD assessments and care accessible within 4 weeks of a GP referral, and, in turn, help every child achieve their potential.
In 2024, our founders, Mark and Darshak, were shocked to find that children needing an NHS autism or ADHD assessment were waiting 4-10 years for these assessments. Delayed assessments can result in children being more likely to develop mental health conditions and fall behind in education. Furthermore, the much-needed pre/post-assessment support (outside of ADHD medications) is typically not funded by the NHS.
These long waits have built up because of increased recognition and understanding of neurodevelopmental conditions, and a lack of investment and innovation within the NHS to meet growing demand.
Mark and Darshak, with their 25 years of combined NHS experience, including building services that have treated over 1,000,000 patients in obesity & ophthalmology, founded Paloma to change this.
As of May 2026, we have successfully reduced waits to less than 3 months by;
- Taking a product-first approach to redesign the care pathway to give families a more consumer-like experience of care
- Our in-house product, engineering and AI team building our own autism and ADHD specific electronic health record and AI clinical support tool to free clinicians from their significant documentation burden to refocus on supporting families
- Investing in expanding the clinician workforce and upskilling them in new ways of working.
We are proud that Paloma is:
- Loved by families, with 4.9 out of 5 Trustpilot and Google ratings
- Care Quality Commission (CQC) registered and quality-focused
- Clinically-led, with a team of over 170 people, including over 100 clinicians supporting families through their care journey. We are hiring 100+ more roles over the next 12 months.
- A community of passionate, mission-driven and innovative team members who challenge the status quo and test and learn from new ideas and approaches.
- In control of our own destiny, as we are profitable and backed by leading healthcare investors Triple Point and Heal Capital
What’s next?
- Whilst we have reduced wait times, it is estimated that up to 500,000 children are still waiting for an NHS autism or ADHD assessment. We won’t rest until this comes down.
- We want to build new services to support families and children diagnosed with autism or ADHD who feel lost after their assessments when the NHS is no longer there for them.
The opportunity
Do you want to finish every day knowing you directly improved the lives of children and families by speeding up access to NHS children’s autism and ADHD assessments? Would you also like the freedom to work with the latest AI tools for software development?
If yes, come join Paloma’s 14-person team of software engineers and product experts as our first Data Engineer!
As we are a rapidly scaling organisation, you will have multiple opportunities to develop. With demonstrated success in the role, you can progress to a Senior Data Engineer and grow our Data Engineering team.
Responsibilities
Collaborate with cross-functional teams, including commercial product, operations, AI, engineering, finance, and Business Intelligence (BI), to understand business data needs and continuously improve our data warehouse to support them. This includes:
- Design, build, and maintain ELT pipelines: own the end-to-end lifecycle of data pipelines that move, transform, and land data reliably into the warehouse, using Dataform and BigQuery as the core of the transformation layer.
- Own and evolve the data warehouse structure: maintain a well-organised, documented, and performant BigQuery warehouse that serves business needs. This includes data modelling, schema design, partitioning strategy, and ongoing cost and performance optimisation.
- Build and maintain reporting infrastructure: translating business and financial reporting requirements into reliable datasets and data models, ensuring stakeholders have accurate, timely, and trustworthy data to inform decision-making.
- Ingest and standardise data from diverse sources: own the ingestion of structured and unstructured files (CSV, JSON, clinical exports, third-party feeds) from a variety of sources including transactional Databases, cloud storage, and external APIs, applying robust validation, error handling, and schema management across the raw and curated data layers.
- Champion data quality, governance, and documentation: implement and maintain data quality checks, testing frameworks, and alerting across pipelines; enforce data governance standards including access controls, PII handling, and lineage tracking; and ensure the warehouse is well-documented so that any team member can understand and trust the data they are working with.
Qualifications and experience
- Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.
- Four years of hands-on experience in data engineering or related roles, with a proven track record of building and maintaining production-grade data pipelines
- Able to communicate clearly and efficiently with all internal teams
Technical skills and experience should include:
- SQL, including complex queries, window functions, and performance optimisation.
- Google BigQuery, including table design, partitioning, clustering, and query performance tuning
- Dataform or equivalent transformation frameworks (dbt, etc.), writing SQLX, managing dependencies, and maintaining modular, well-tested transformation logic
- Solid understanding of ETL/ELT pipeline design, including incremental loads, idempotency, error handling, and pipeline monitoring
- Working with event-driven or streaming data pipelines (Pub/Sub, Kafka, or equivalent)
- Python or JS for data pipeline scripting, transformation logic, or tooling
- Version control (Git) and collaborative engineering workflows
- Strong attention to data quality, experience implementing data validation, testing, and alerting within pipelines
- Proven ability to collaborate cross-functionally in translating business and financial reporting requirements into reliable data models, and supporting non-technical stakeholders in getting the most out of the data warehouse
- Experience ingesting and processing structured and unstructured files (CSV, JSON, XML, Parquet, PDF) from a variety of sources, including cloud storage buckets and third-party exports.
Desired but not essential skills and experience include:
- Broader Google Cloud Platform ecosystem, like Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Scheduler
- Data orchestration tools such as Cloud Composer (Airflow), Prefect, or equivalent
- Looker/Data Studio and “Conventional analytics” (aka. BQ agenta)
- Building or maintaining a data warehouse in a regulated or healthcare environment
- GDPR and data privacy requirements as they apply to data pipelines handling personal or clinical data
- Working alongside product and clinical teams to translate business questions into data models and metrics
- Familiarity with data lake concepts and architecture, organising raw, cleansed, and curated data layers (bronze/silver/gold or equivalent), and working with large volumes of semi-structured data before it reaches the warehouse
Why join Paloma?
You will be part of a mission-driven organisation that’s transforming access to autism and ADHD care in England. For all employees, we offer:
- A strong and positive culture that prioritises team building, transparency, and career development. This includes protected time and budget for team connection and learning.
- Comprehensive compensation, including:
- Competitive compensation
- Annual salary reviews, ensuring they are competitive
- 5% employer pension contribution
- Equity compensation through Share Options in Paloma Health
- Optional Private Medical Insurance and Employee Assistance Programme
- Home Office Equipment Allowance
- A unique annual leave benefits package which includes:
- 37 days of annual leave. This is 28 standard days, plus eight bank holidays, plus your birthday off.
- Option to buy an additional 5 days per year (giving a maximum of 42 days)
- Where required, 2 days per year of special leave for events that can happen in life, whether personal or family-related
- Additional benefits include:
- A premium performance company laptop
- NHS discounts, including the Blue Light Card (as we are an NHS provider).
Equality & Diversity
Paloma Health is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity and inclusion in the workplace and throughout the application process. We do not discriminate based on any protected characteristic.
Accommodations
We’re glad to accommodate candidates who need adjustments throughout the hiring process. We encourage you to be open about the adjustments you need, so we can adapt our interview process accordingly.
Safer Recruitment & Pre-Employment Checks
Paloma Health ensures that supporting people to be safe is at the heart of our work and a key priority. As part of our pre-employment checks, you will be asked to complete a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check. Depending on your role within the business, this will be at either an Enhanced, Standard, or Basic level. We are committed to safer recruitment practices and expect all applicants to share our dedication to safeguarding.
Application process
Please apply via our website. We understand that applying for a new job requires significant effort, and we appreciate the time you put into it and look forward to reviewing your application.
Join us and be part of our journey to revolutionise access to NHS autism and ADHD care!
