Data Engineer, Graduate or Industrial Placement- Sept 2025 start - London - ref. o85497115
About Vortexa
Vortexa was founded to solve the immense information gap that exists in the energy industry. By using massive amounts of new satellite data and pioneering work in artificial intelligence, Vortexa creates an unprecedented view on the global seaborne energy flows in real-time, bringing transparency and efficiency to the energy markets and society as a whole.
http://www.vortexa.com/
The Challenge
Processing thousands of rich data points per second from many vastly different external sources, moving terabytes of data while processing it in real-time, running complex prediction and forecasting AI models while coupling their output into a hybrid human-machine data refinement process and presenting the result through a nimble low-latency SaaS solution used by customers around the globe is no small feat of science and engineering.This processing requires models that can survive the scrutiny of industry experts, data analysts and traders, with the performance, stability, latency and agility a fast-moving startup influencing multi-$m transactions requires.
The Data Production Team is responsible for all of Vortexa’s data. It ranges from mixing raw satellite data from 600,000 vessels with rich but incomplete text data, to generating high-value forecasts such as the vessel destination, cargo onboard, ship-to-ship transfer detection, dark vessels, congestion, future prices, etc
The team has built a variety of procedural, statistical and machine learning models that enabled us to provide the most accurate and comprehensive view of energy flows. We take pride in applying cutting-edge research to real-world problems in a robust, long-lasting and maintainable way.The quality of our data is continuously benchmarked and assessed by experienced in-house market and data analysts to ensure the quality of our predictions.
You’ll be instrumental in designing and building infrastructure and applications to propel the design, deployment, and benchmarking of existing and new pipelines and ML models. Working with software and data engineers, data scientists and market analysts, you’ll help bridge the gap between scientific experiments and commercial products by ensuring 100% uptime and bulletproof fault-tolerance of every component of the team's data pipelines.
Learning opportunities
You will be considered an integral part of a team of 3-5 engineers and data scientists, and will contribute to delivering the same goals & roadmap as everyone around you. By working on the same projects as everyone else, you will get prompt and thorough support and feedback: we believe this is the best way to maximise your learning and impact.
Our goal is to identify and nurture promising talent: it is in our best interest to help you be successful, and if there is a fit you’ll be first in line for hiring.
The role offers the opportunity to help with and lead projects on:
- Data engineering: extracting, transforming and loading data at scale
- Machine learning: prototype, improve and deploy to production algorithms making inferences, at scale
- Business: interact with experts from the energy industry, and observe and influence a start-up getting a lot of market traction and reacting to it
Key technologies you will use:
- Programming: Python or Java, and SQL required. Some knowledge of Rust is an advantage
- Version control & CI/CD: Github
- Cloud: AWS
- Orchestration: Docker, Airflow, MLFlow, and Kubernetes
- Distributed Messaging: Kafka / Redpanda
- Storage: S3 and RDS
For placements of more than 6 months, you’ll be offered to change teams halfway through your placement.
Requirements- Fluent in software engineering fundamentals
- Driven by working in an intellectually engaging environment with the top minds in the industry, where constructive and friendly challenges and debates are encouraged, not avoided
- Excited about working in a start-up environment: not afraid of challenges, excited to bring new ideas to production, and a positive can-do will-do person, not afraid to push the boundaries of your job role
- Fluent in Python, and comfortable with Pandas / Numpy
- A vibrant, diverse company pushing ourselves and the technology to deliver beyond the cutting edge
- A team of motivated characters and top minds striving to be the best at what we do at all times
- Constantly learning and exploring new tools and technologies
- Acting as company owners (all Vortexa staff have equity options)– in a business-savvy and responsible way
- Motivated by being collaborative, working and achieving together
- A flexible working policy- accommodating both remote & home working, with regular staff events
- Private Health Insurance offered via Vitality to help you look after your physical health
- Global Volunteering Policy to help you ‘do good’ and feel better